NASA is giving every earthling a chance to ride shotgun to the moon—digitally. Submit your name by launch day and it will circle the lunar far side with the four Artemis 2 astronauts, creating a 21st-century time capsule etched on an SD card inside the Orion capsule.
NASA has turned the historic Artemis 2 mission into the solar system’s largest group photo. Starting now, anyone on Earth can register a name that will be encoded onto a radiation-hardened SD card and stowed inside the Orion capsule when it lifts off from Florida between February and April. The campaign vaults past mere memorabilia: it is a strategic move to cement public ownership of America’s return to deep space.
How the “Send Your Name Around the Moon” System Works
- Visit NASA’s dedicated portal, enter any name and choose a four-digit PIN.
- The site generates a boarding pass with mission facts and a QR code that enrolls you in NASA’s virtual guest program for live launch alerts.
- All entries are collated, compressed and written to a commercial-grade SD card already installed in Orion’s crew-service-module adapter.
- After the 10-day flight—during which Orion will travel 4,700 miles beyond the far side of the moon—the capsule splashes down and the card becomes part of the permanent mission archive.
More than 1.5 million names were logged within the first 72 hours, NASA confirmed on X, putting the project on pace to rival the 2.4 million names that flew on Artemis 1.
Why NASA Wants Your Name on a Lunar Flight
Artemis 2 is not just a test drive—it is a geopolitical statement. Congress appropriated $7.5 billion for the Artemis campaign this fiscal year, and public engagement translates directly into sustained funding. By giving every voter a literal stake in the capsule, NASA replicates the Apollo-era trick of turning rocket launches into shared national moments, but at internet scale.
The gambit also feeds data. Each registration includes opt-in permission for NASA to map global interest in real time, information the agency can wave in front of partners like ESA, CSA and JAXA when cost-sharing the next lunar landers and Gateway station modules.
Artemis 2 by the Numbers
- Launch window: February 6 – April 30, 2026
- Vehicle: 322-ft Space Launch System (SLS) Block 1
- Distance beyond lunar far side: 4,700 mi—farthest humans will have ever traveled from Earth
- Crew: 3 NASA astronauts + 1 Canadian astronaut
- Flight duration: 10 days, 2 lunar orbits, Pacific splashdown
- Digital payload: 8 GB SD card with public names, mission patch art, student essays
From Apollo Flags to SD Cards: A Brief History of Space Mementos
Apollo 11 carried a silicon disk etched with 73 goodwill messages from world leaders. Apollo 14 smuggled a few hundred postage stamps. Artemis 1 flew a flash drive with 2.4 million names and a 3-D-printed statue of a Greek goddess. Artemis 2 scales the concept to today’s cloud-native audience while adding a layer of interactivity—every participant receives mission updates timed to major burns and trajectory corrections.
Who Rides When the Engines Fire
The four humans actually strapping in are:
- Reid Wiseman – mission commander, former ISS resident, U.S. Navy captain
- Victor Glover – pilot, first Black astronaut assigned to a lunar mission
- Christina Koch – mission specialist, holds women’s single-flight duration record (328 days)
- Jeremy Hansen – Canadian Space Agency representative, first non-American to leave Earth orbit since Apollo-Soyuz
They will not land; instead they will stress-test life-support, heat-shield and guidance systems while looping the moon twice. Success clears the way for Artemis 3, the mission that will deliver two astronauts—one woman and one man—to the lunar south pole as early as mid-2027.
What Happens to the Names After Splashdown
Once Orion is towed aboard the USS Portland, technicians will remove the SD card, vacuum-seal it and transfer it to the Johnson Space Center archives alongside Apollo telemetry tapes. NASA also plans to release an open-source torrent of the exact dataset, letting classrooms verify their bit-string survived Van Allen radiation and deep-space cosmic rays.
Bottom Line: Claim Your Lunar Legacy in 30 Seconds
There is no cost, no geographic restriction and no cap on how many names you submit. The portal stays open until 23:59 EST on launch minus-one day. After that, the list is locked, encrypted and bolted inside humanity’s next great leap.
Secure your seat—virtually—on the only ride that will graze the moon in 2026. Then come back to onlytrustedinfo.com for the fastest, most definitive updates on every Artemis milestone, from the first SLS ignition to the moment your name whispers past the lunar horizon.
