A fleeting orbital alignment on April 6 created a new record in human spaceflight. The four crew members of NASA's Artemis 2 mission and the three astronauts aboard China's Tiangong space station were positioned farther apart from each other than any two groups of humans have ever been.
This record was set by the vast distances inherent in their respective missions. Artemis 2 is a lunar flyby mission, which will take its crew on a trajectory around the Moon and back. The Tiangong station, in contrast, orbits Earth at a much lower altitude. The precise moment of maximum separation occurred as the two spacecraft were on opposite sides of the planet, with one group headed toward deep space and the other circling closer to home.