Doğuş University’s Cosmic Exploration and Communication Office (DÜEKİ) Closely Monitors the Artemis II Mission

Exactly 54 years after the final flight of the Apollo program in 1972—which carried humanity to the Moon during the Cold War—at 01:35 AM Türkiye time on the night of April 1–2, the Orion spacecraft was launched from the United States’ Kennedy Space Center. This time, as part of the Artemis program’s first crewed mission, Artemis II, it carried four astronauts—one Canadian and three Americans.

While the mission heralds humanity’s return to the Moon after a long hiatus, it also marks several firsts: reaching the farthest point from Earth ever traveled by humans, enabling direct observation with the naked eye of the far side of the Moon, and including in its crew both the first woman and the first African-American person to orbit the Moon. The Artemis II mission will not land on the Moon but will instead orbit around it before it reaches back to Earth on April 10th.

Following the Apollo 13 mission—immortalized by the phrase “Houston: We Have Had a Problem” and known for its miraculous return to Earth after an accident prevented a lunar landing—Artemis II becomes the mission that travels the farthest distance from Earth, marking April 2026 as a historically significant moment.

This flight, serving as a rehearsal for the anticipated return of the humans to the Moon in 2028, is also being closely followed by Doğuş University’s Cosmic Exploration and Communication Office (DÜEKİ). Established in 2025 and bringing together academics from diverse disciplines, the Office aims to advance space research, knowledge production, and scientific contributions toward humanity’s shared future.

Among the founding members of the Office is Dr. Itır Toksöz Bullens, a faculty member in the Department of International Relations at Doğuş University’s Faculty of Economics, Administrative and Social Sciences, and a scholar known for her work in space politics. She considers this long-prepared and now realized mission to be a turning point for the future of space exploration. Noting that, for years, crewed missions have been limited to low Earth orbit and International Space Station operations, Dr. Toksöz Bullens emphasizes that Artemis II represents the crossing of this threshold and the revival of visions that aim to carry humanity to other destinations in the solar system and into deep space.

She further notes that the lunar mission is significant not only for planned future stations or settlements on the Moon, but also for the next major target—Mars—as well as for the innovations this new era of space activity will bring and the collaborations it will foster both between states and between public and private sectors. She concludes by stating that, as DÜEKİ, they will continue to study and evaluate all these processes.