Here they are. @SenBillNelson announces the #Artemis II crew, the next astronauts to fly around the Moon:@Astro_Christina@Astro_Jeremy@AstroVicGlover@Astro_Reid
— NASA (@NASA) April 3, 2023
We go together. https://t.co/XdUizg2Wye pic.twitter.com/6Yo4I2lKeJ
The four astronauts who will make the first lunar orbit in more than 50 years since the end of the Apollo missions were named by NASA on Monday. The four astronauts represent a significant difference from the Apollo era when all the astronauts were white males, including the first woman and the first black astronaut to travel into lunar orbit.
Victor Glover will be the first black astronaut to enter lunar orbit and Christina Hammock Koch will be the first woman to travel to the Moon. The two will be joined by the commander of the Moon mission, Reid Wiseman, and astronaut Jeremy Hansen.
"The Artemis -2 crew is an embodiment of thousands of people who have been working nonstop to take us to the stars. The four astronauts were introduced to the globe by NASA Administrator Bill Nelson as "their crew, our crew, and humanity's crew."
Christina Hammock Koch, an astronaut who joined NASA in 2013, worked as a flight engineer on Expeditions 59, 60, and 61 of the International Space Station (ISS). On the Artemis-II mission, which will take her around the Moon, she will serve as a mission specialist. Koch, an engineer by trade, has completed six spacewalks totaling 42 hours and 15 minutes, including the first three all-female spacewalks. She has been in space for 328 days in all.
Victor Glover, an astronaut, will be the first person of color to travel to the moon. On a previous SpaceX Crew-1 flight for NASA to the Space Station, astronaut Glover was a pilot. He participated in four spacewalks while serving as a flight engineer on Expedition 64 to the space station, where he made contributions to scientific research and technology demonstrations. Glover will operate the Orion spacecraft into the lunar environment.
Jeremy Hansen is an astronaut who represents the Canadian Space Agency, a collaborator with NASA on the Artemis mission. When the astronaut launches to the Moon the following year, it will be his first flight. Hansen, a colonel in the Canadian Armed Forces and a former fighter pilot earned a Bachelor of Science in space science from the Royal Military College of Canada in Kingston, Ontario, and a Master of Science in physics with a focus on a Wide Field of View Satellite Tracking from the same institution in 2000.
Reid Wiseman, an astronaut who is about to launch on his second space trip, will command the Artemis-II mission, which will put humans in lunar orbit 50 years after astronaut Eugene Cernan oversaw the final Apollo mission to the Moon. In addition to spending nearly 13 hours as the lead spacewalker on two journeys outside the orbiting complex, Wiseman has spent more than 165 days in space overall.
The 10-day Artemis II mission, which will travel 2.3 million kilometers around the moon and back, is intended to show that Orion's life-support systems and other systems will function as intended while carrying men into deep space.
