To prepare for NASA's first journey to the moon in over half a century, the crew of the Artemis II spent the summer training in Earth's most moon-like environment.. NASA astronauts Reid Wiseman ...

Iceland has served as a lunar stand-in for training NASA astronauts since the days of the Apollo missions, and this summer the Artemis II crew took its place in that long history.

"Iceland. Better than space." That's the new tagline from Iceland's tourism board. We asked the head of Visit Iceland why her country might have an edge over space — and consulted NASA as well.

Recently, NASA sent a team of over a dozen scientists and engineers to Iceland to test new Mars exploration techniques in a lava field that closely matches the Mars landscape.

The photos, taken by NASA's Landsat 9 satellite, show lava flowing from a fissure in the Sundhnúkur crater row on Iceland's Reykjanes Peninsula.

The astronauts that went to Iceland this summer are training for Artemis II: one small step towards NASA’s long-time goal to put humans back on the surface of the Moon.

This summer, the German Aerospace Center is testing instruments for NASA's VERITAS Venus mission on Iceland's lava flows, a stand-in for the hellishly hot planet.

The U.K. based aerospace company, Space Solar, plans to launch its space-based solar power plant by 2030 to deliver clean energy to Iceland, which is already a renewable-energy powerhouse.

NASA agrees: the agency has repeatedly used Iceland as a stand-in for the Moon, and it's doing so again as it prepares astronauts for new missions off-world.