HOUSTON — NASA officials confirmed Wednesday that the four astronauts of the Artemis II mission have completed a rigorous two-year geology curriculum, ensuring they will be able to provide highly technical, Latin-based names for the various rocks they are legally and physically prohibited from touching.

The crew—comprising Commander Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, Christina Koch, and Jeremy Hansen—is scheduled to launch in April 2026 on a 10-day odyssey that will take them 7,400 kilometers away from the lunar surface. To prepare for this experience of looking at a window, the astronauts spent months in the remote wilderness of Labrador and Arizona, learning to identify ancient lava flows and impact craters that they will eventually view from the safety of a pressurized titanium hull traveling at 32,000 kilometers per hour.

"It is vital that when we fly past the Moon at incredible speeds, our crew can look out the porthole and say 'That is a basaltic plain' rather than 'That is a big grey spot,'" said a NASA spokesperson, noting that the $4.1 billion per-launch cost of the Space Launch System (SLS) would be wasted if the descriptions were not sufficiently academic.

Records indicate the training included the use of high-end Hasselblad cameras, allowing the crew to capture images of the Moon that will be roughly 4% sharper than the ones currently available on Google Moon. The mission marks the first time humans have ventured beyond low Earth orbit since 1972, a milestone NASA is celebrating by performing a maneuver colloquially known as a 'drive-by.'

"We have mastered 300,000 individual spacecraft components and survived grueling survival training in the North Atlantic," said one mission specialist, who requested anonymity to speak freely about the curriculum. "All of this so that when we reach the farthest point of human reach, I can confirm that the Moon is, in fact, still there and appears to be made of rock."

Critics have pointed out that the Artemis IV mission, which actually involves standing on the Moon, is not scheduled until at least 2028, provided the current 24-month delay cycle remains stable. Until then, the agency maintains that sending four highly trained humans to take selfies with a celestial body is a necessary 'risk mitigation' step.

At press time, the crew was reportedly practicing their 'disappointed but professional' faces for the moment they pass the Apollo 11 landing site at a distance of several thousand kilometers.