Four astronauts took the stage on Wednesday at NASA’s Johnson Space Center and spoke of nations working together and of inspiring everyone everywhere.

“Collaboration needs to be the ultimate goal if eight billion of us are going to have a bright future on this planet,” said Jeremy Hansen, an astronaut from the Canadian Space Agency.

He and three American astronauts are set to travel around the moon and back to Earth as soon as next February in the NASA mission called Artemis II.

“As we come around the far side, just having humanity stop for a moment and say, ‘Wow, look at what we can do when we work together,’ let’s just set goals to do a better job of that on this planet today,” Mr. Hansen said.

He, along with Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover and Christina Koch of NASA, was speaking during a NASA news conference.

Their remarks seemed at times out of step with today’s polarized nation and world, and they were also in marked contrast with what Sean Duffy, who is the acting administrator of NASA in addition to serving as the U.S. transportation secretary, said a couple of days earlier.

During a ceremony on Monday announcing the next 10 people slated to join NASA’s astronaut corps, Mr. Duffy depicted the moon program as a race between the United States and China, which has said it is aiming to land its astronauts on the moon by 2030.

“I’ll be damned if the Chinese beat NASA,” Mr. Duffy said, sounding like a football coach giving a fiery speech to his players before a game. “We are going to win.”

The Artemis II crew did not mention China at all during their news conference, even when asked about Mr. Duffy’s remarks. But it was clear that the four were raring to get to the launchpad.

“Usually in a crew, there’s like a magical moment,” said Mr. Wiseman, the commander of the mission, “where all of a sudden, you just look around and you’re like, ‘Ah, we’re ready to go.’”

For Artemis II, the astronauts will remain inside their Orion crew capsule during a 10-day trip that will swing around the moon before returning to Earth and splashing down in the Pacific Ocean off San Diego.

They will not land on the lunar surface. But they will be the closest anyone has been to the moon in more than 50 years.

The mission’s main goal is to check that the life support systems on Orion work as designed. That can be tested only with people aboard.

The spacecraft offers the interior volume of roughly two minivans, meaning crew members will not be able to get away from one another.

“We won’t have that luxury,” Ms. Koch said.

She said the crew had intentionally spent a lot of time together in close quarters. “We are just ready to take those little inconveniences, but also the communication that it takes to know when someone does need a little alone time,” she said.

The Artemis II astronauts have this camaraderie and familiarity, in part, because they have spent more time together than they originally planned to.

NASA officials had hoped that Artemis II could get off the ground in late 2023, a year after Artemis I, an uncrewed test flight of Orion and the rocket that carries it to orbit, the Space Launch System. Artemis I was largely successful, but the heat shield on Orion sustained unexpected damage during entry, and engineers spent time investigating the cause.

In December 2024, NASA announced another delay for Artemis II, to April 2026.

But there was a twist.

Usually, the space agency prefaces its target launch dates with “no earlier than” to indicate possible additional delays. For this new target, NASA started saying Artemis II would launch “no later than April 2026,” hinting there was a chance the launch would happen sooner.

NASA officials now say that the launch could be as soon as Feb. 5. Posted in hallways around the Johnson Space Center this week are signs that say “20 weeks until launch,” indicating that the space agency is confidently working toward the earlier target.

The landmark event — astronauts landing on the moon during Artemis III — is scheduled for mid-2027. But even the NASA officials in charge of the moon program admit that the Starship — the giant rocket that Elon Musk’s SpaceX rocket company is developing to serve as the lunar lander — is late.

“If we forecast where they are, it’s beyond where we were targeting,” Lori Glaze, NASA acting associate administrator for human exploration, said during an interview this week.

She said SpaceX had committed to trying to speed up its work.

The Artemis II astronauts spoke about how their flight would set the stage for the success of Artemis III. But they will have a chance to perform scientific observations that have never been done before.

Ms. Koch described how the Artemis II astronauts could be the first to look directly at the far side of the moon as they swing around, more than 5,000 miles above the surface. The Apollo missions all landed on the near side of the moon, which had to be in daylight, which meant the far side was almost entirely in darkness. This time, the sun could be shining on much of the far side.

“Believe it or not, human eyes are one of the best scientific instruments that we have,” she said. They may notice subtle colors that are not readily seen in photographs taken by orbiting robotic spacecraft.

The astronauts also revealed the name they have chosen for their Orion spacecraft: Integrity.

In an interview later, Mr. Wiseman said that a couple of months ago, the crew, along with the two astronauts serving as their backups, talked about what to name the capsule.

“We just sat with every name we had ever thought, and funny enough, ‘Integrity’ wasn’t on that list when we all sat down,” Mr. Wiseman said. “I think Christina threw that name in kind of toward the end.”

That fit with the mission statement and core values of the two space agencies.

“Once ‘Integrity’ was thrown out there,” Mr. Wiseman said, “it was minutes, and we were done.”

As for their legacy a century or two in the future, Mr. Wiseman said he hoped the team would fade into history.

“If we are forgotten, then Artemis has been successful,” he said. “We have humans on Mars. We have humans out on the moons of Saturn. We are expanding in the solar system.”

He added: “Maybe we inspired some kids somewhere, and maybe that’s our footnote. We inspired Susie or Johnny to do what they did. That would be magical.”