No human has traveled beyond Earth orbit since 1972, and none will for the foreseeable future
The old claim turned out to be wrong and was rejected by evidence.
TaughtThe last people to leave low-Earth orbit were the Apollo 17 astronauts in December 1972. Ever since, human spaceflight has been stuck circling a few hundred kilometres up (the Space Shuttle, the ISS) and returning to deep space felt perpetually a decade away.
NowOn 1 April 2026, NASA's Artemis II launched four astronauts on a flight around the Moon, the first crewed mission beyond low-Earth orbit since Apollo 17. They looped around the far side and splashed down safely on 10 April, traveling farther from Earth than any humans in history.
What actually happened
For over 53 years the claim was simply true, which is why it hardened into a sense that deep-space human flight belonged to the past. Artemis II ended the streak: commander Reid Wiseman, pilot Victor Glover, and mission specialists Christina Koch and Jeremy Hansen rode an SLS rocket and the Orion capsule out past the Moon and back on a roughly ten-day flight.
The crew set a new record for the farthest humans have ever traveled from Earth (about 695,000 miles) surpassing the mark Apollo 13 held since 1970. The mission also carried the first woman, the first person of color, and the first non-American to fly beyond low-Earth orbit.
The honest framing: Artemis II was a flyby, not a landing; no one walked on the Moon, and a crewed landing (Artemis III) is still ahead. But the specific, long-standing fact taught as a fixture of the space age, that no human had left Earth orbit since 1972, stopped being true in April 2026.
Newsletter
Get new weekly revisions
Sources
Who was taught this
Still standard through 2026, so anyone who finished school between 1950 and 2026 learned the earlier version.