Four astronauts selected for the first flight to the moon in half a century

The astronauts who will lead the first mission to the Moon in five decades were announced Monday: NASA’s Reed Wiseman, Victor Glover and Christina Koch, and the Canadian Space Agency’s Jeremy Hansen.

According to CNN, Reed Wiseman is a 47-year-old distinguished naval aviator and test pilot who was first selected as a NASA astronaut in 2009. He has made one previous space flight (a 165-day stay on the International Space Station), which was launched aboard a Russian Soyuz rocket in 2014. Most recently, Wiseman served as Chief of the Astronaut Office before resigning in November 2022, making him eligible for a flight assignment. Wiseman will command the Artemis II mission.

Jeremy Hansen, 47, is a fighter pilot who was selected by the Canadian Space Agency for astronaut training in 2009. Hansen is one of four active Canadian astronauts and recently became the first Canadian to be put in charge of training NASA’s new class of astronauts. He will be the first Canadian ever to go into deep space.

Victor Glover is a 46-year-old naval aviator who returned to Earth from his first space flight in 2021 after piloting a second flight with the crew of the SpaceX Crew Dragon spacecraft and spending nearly six months aboard the International Space Station.

“That’s a lot more than the four names that were announced,” Glover said during the announcement Monday at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston. “We must celebrate this moment in human history… This is the next step in the journey that will take humanity to Mars.”

Glover served with several military squadrons in the United States and Japan in the 2000s, and was trained as a test pilot by the US Air Force. When he was selected to the NASA Astronaut Corps in 2013, he served in the US Senate as a member of the legislature. In total, Glover logged 3,000 hours of flight time in over 40 aircraft, made over 400 carrier forced landings and 24 sorties.

Glover’s first flight into space took place as part of the SpaceX Crew-1 team, which traveled to the International Space Station in November 2020 for a six-month stay in the orbiting laboratory.

And finally, 44-year-old Christina Koch. She is a veteran of six spacewalks, including the first all-female spacewalk in 2019, according to CNN. She holds the record for the longest solo space flight by a woman, spending a total of 328 days in space. Koch is also an electrical engineer who has helped develop scientific instrumentation for several NASA missions. Koch also spent a year at the South Pole, a difficult stay that could well prepare her for a busy mission to the moon.

The Artemis II mission will be based on the uncrewed Artemis I test mission, which sent NASA’s Orion capsule on a 1.4 million-mile journey around the Moon, ending in December. The US space agency considered this mission a success and is still working on analyzing all the data collected.

If all goes according to plan, Artemis II will take off around November 2024. Seat-belted crew members inside an Orion spacecraft lift off on a NASA-designed Space Launch System rocket from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida.

The journey is expected to last about 10 days and send the crew beyond the Moon, potentially farther than a human has ever traveled in history, although the exact distance has yet to be determined.

“The exact distance beyond the Moon will depend on the day of launch and the relative distance of the Moon from Earth at the time of the mission,” NASA spokeswoman Katherine Hambleton said in an email.

After a flyby of the Moon, the spacecraft will return to Earth for a splashdown in the Pacific Ocean.

Artemis II is expected to pave the way for the Artemis III mission later this decade, which NASA promised would land the first woman of color on the surface of the moon. It will also mark the first landing of humans on the moon since the Apollo program ended in 1972.

The Artemis III mission is expected to launch later this decade, according to CNN. But much of the technology the mission will need, including suits for walking on the moon and a lunar lander to bring astronauts to the surface of the moon, is still under development.

NASA plans to launch Artemis III in 2025, although the space agency’s inspector general has already said delays will likely push the mission to 2026 or later.

The US space agency has been seeking to return humans to the Moon for more than a decade. The Artemis program was designed to pave the way for a permanent lunar outpost, allowing astronauts to live and work in the depths of space in the long term, as NASA and its partners pave the way for sending the first humans to Mars.

Vanessa Wyche, director of NASA’s Johnson Space Center, declined to give CNN details about the selection process. But she highlighted the diversity of the Artemis II crew, which includes both men and women, and not just a staff of white test pilots, as has been the case on historic missions of the past.

Koch revealed in an interview with CNN’s Ed Lavandera that the group found out they had been cast a few weeks ago. “We were all sent to the meeting that was on our calendars under a different pretext that didn’t sound as grandiloquent as the one it was supposed to be,” says Koch. “And by chance, two of us were very late for this meeting.” She said the proposal left her “speechless.”

“It’s really a great honor,” she added. “It’s an honor not to go into space yourself, but because it’s amazing to be part of this team that goes back to the moon and on to Mars.”