On Monday, Nasa introduced the four astronauts that will head to the moon on its Artemis II lunar flyby mission, set for launch as early as next year.
Nasa astronauts Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, Christina Hammock Koch, and Canadian astronaut Jeremy Hansen will be part of the first crewed voyage around the moon since the end of the Apollo era over 50 years ago.
They will work as a team to execute an ambitious set of demonstrations during the flight test.
Artemis II’s crew was chosen from a pool of 18 Nasa astronauts — nine women and nine men — selected for the Artemis program in 2020.
The crew presented on Monday included not only the first woman but the first person of colour assigned to a lunar mission. It also includes the first Canadian astronaut for a moon mission.
The crew was revealed during an event at Ellington Field near Nasa’s Johnson Space Center in Houston.
‘The Artemis II crew represents thousands of people working tirelessly to bring us to the stars. This is their crew, this is our crew, this is humanity’s crew,’ said Nasa Administrator Bill Nelson.
‘Together, we are ushering in a new era of exploration for a new generation of star sailors and dreamers – the Artemis Generation.’
The approximately 10-day Artemis II flight test will launch on the agency’s powerful Space Launch System rocket, prove the Orion spacecraft’s life-support systems, and validate the capabilities and techniques needed for humans to live and work in deep space.
The flight, set to build upon the successful uncrewed Artemis I mission completed in December, will set the stage for the first woman and first person of colour on the Moon through the Artemis program, paving the way for future for long-term human exploration missions to the Moon, and eventually Mars.
Artemis II will mark the debut crewed flight – but not the first lunar landing – of an Apollo successor program aimed at returning astronauts to the moon’s surface this decade and establishing a lunar outpost, creating a stepping stone to human exploration of Mars.
The objective of the Artemis II flight, a 10-day, 2.3-million-km journey around the moon and back, is to demonstrate that all of Orion’s life-support apparatus and other systems will operate as designed with astronauts aboard in deep space.
The flight is targeted for as early as 2024.
As planned, Artemis II will venture some 10,300 km beyond the far side of the moon before returning, marking the closest pass that humans have made to Earth’s natural satellite since Apollo 17.
If Artemis II is a success, Nasa plans to follow up a few years later with the programs’ first lunar landing of astronauts, one of them a woman, on Artemis III, then continue with additional crewed missions about once a year.
Compared with the Apollo program, born of the Cold War-era U.S.-Soviet space race, Artemis is broader based, enlisting commercial partners such as Elon Musk’s SpaceX and the government space agencies of Canada, Europe and Japan.
It also marks a major redirection of Nasa’s human spaceflight ambitions beyond low-Earth orbit after decades focused on its Space Shuttles and the International Space Station.
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