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Astronauts expected to lead the first crewed Moon mission in five decades are in line to begin training for the historic Artemis II lunar flyby, scheduled to take off in November 2024, it was announced Monday.
The astronauts are NASA’s Reed Wiseman, Victor Glover and Christina Koch, and the Canadian Space Agency’s Jeremy Hansen.
Wiseman is a 47-year-old naval aviator and test pilot who was first selected to become a NASA astronaut in 2009. A native of Baltimore, Maryland, he has completed one prior space flight, a 165-day trip to the International Space Station that launched in 2014 aboard a Russian Soyuz rocket. Most recently, Wiseman served as head of the Astronaut Office before leaving the post in November 2022, making him eligible. flight assignment.
Wiseman will serve as commander of the Artemis II mission.
Hansen, 47, is a fighter pilot who was selected by the Canadian Space Agency for astronaut training in 2009. From London, Ontario, Hansen is one of only four active Canadian astronauts, and he recently became the first Canadian to be in charge of training for a new class of NASA astronauts.
He will be the first Canadian to travel into deep space.
Glover is a 46-year-old naval aviator who returned to Earth from his first space flight in 2021 after piloting SpaceX’s second crewed flight. Spending approximately six months on the Dragon spacecraft and the International Space Station.
“This is much more than the four names that were announced,” Glover said during the announcement Monday at NASA Johnson Space Center in Houston. “We need to celebrate this moment in human history. …This is the next step in the journey that will take humanity to Mars.”
Born in Pomona, California, Glover served in several military squadrons in the United States and Japan in the 2000s, and he completed test pilot training with the U.S. Air Force. When he was selected for the NASA astronaut corps in 2013, he was working as a legislative aide in the US Senate. All told, Glover logged 3,000 flight hours in more than 40 aircraft, more than 400 carrier arrested landings and 24 combat missions.
Glover’s first mission in space was as part of the SpaceX Crew-1 team, which departed for the International Space Station in November 2020 for a six-month stay in the orbiting laboratory.
Koch, 44, is a veteran of six spacewalks — including the first all-female spacewalk in 2019. She holds the record for the longest solo space flight by a woman with a total of 328 days in space. Koch is also an electrical engineer who helped develop scientific instruments for many NASA missions. Koch, a native of Grand Rapids, Michigan, also spent a year at the South Pole, a grueling stay that may have prepared her well for the intensity of a moon mission.
The Artemis II mission will be based on Artemis I, an unmanned test mission that sent NASA’s Orion capsule on a 1.4 million-mile journey to orbit the moon that concluded in December. The space agency deemed that mission a success and is still working to review all the data collected.
If everything goes according to plan, Artemis II will fly around November 2024. The crew members, trapped inside the Orion spacecraft, will launch atop a NASA-developed Space Launch System rocket from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida.
The trip is expected to last about 10 days and will send the crew further beyond the Moon, possibly farther than any human has traveled in history, although the exact distance has not yet been determined.
“The exact distance beyond the Moon will depend on the relative distance of the Moon from Earth on the day of the flight and the time of the mission,” NASA spokeswoman Katherine Hambleton said via email.
After orbiting the Moon, the spacecraft will return to Earth for a splashdown landing in the Pacific Ocean.
Artemis II is expected to pave the way for the Artemis III mission later this decade, which NASA has vowed will put the first woman and person of color on the lunar surface. This will be the first time humans will land on the Moon since the Apollo program ended in 1972.
The Artemis III mission is expected to launch later this decade. But much of the technology the mission will need, including spacesuits to walk on the moon and a lunar lander to carry astronauts to the moon’s surface, is still in development.
NASA is targeting a 2025 launch date for Artemis III, although the space agency’s inspector general has previously said delays would push the mission to 2026 or later.
The space agency has been trying to return people to the moon for more than a decade. The Artemis program was designed to pave the way for establishing a permanent lunar outpost, allowing astronauts to live and work in space for long periods of time as NASA and its partners pave the way to send the first humans to Mars.
Vanessa Wyche, director of NASA’s Johnson Space Center, declined to provide details to CNN about the selection process. But he emphasized the diversity of the Artemis II crew, which includes men and women rather than being staffed solely by white male test pilots, as has been the case with past historic missions.
“I can tell you, they all still have the right things,” Wyche said. “We have different requirements than we had when we had test pilots” on the inaugural missions.
Koch said in an interview with CNN’s Ed Lavandera that the group found out they were selected a few weeks ago.
“We were all sent under a different excuse to a meet that was on our calendar that didn’t seem as high as it was going to be,” the coach said. “And coincidentally two of us arrived very late to that meeting.”
He said the proposal had left him “speechless.”
“It’s truly an honor,” he said. “It’s an honor – not just to get into space myself – but because it’s amazing to be part of this team that is going to the Moon and back to Mars.”
An interview with the four astronauts will air Tuesday on “CNN This Morning,” beginning at 6 a.m. ET.