NASA Names Artemis 2 Crew, First Astronauts Set for Lunar Flight Since Apollo

On Monday, April 3, 2023, at Ellington Field near the Johnson Space Center in Houston, NASA put four names to the first crew bound for the moon in more than 50 years. Reid Wiseman will command Artemis 2, Victor Glover will pilot, and Christina Koch and Canada's Jeremy Hansen will serve as mission specialists. Nearly the entire active astronaut corps attended, apart from the three people then aboard the International Space Station, along with NASA Administrator Bill Nelson and other agency leaders.

The four were chosen from a pool of 41 active NASA astronauts and four Canadian Space Agency astronauts. The decision rested with Joe Acaba, chief of the astronaut office, Norm Knight, head of flight operations, and Vanessa Wyche, director of Johnson Space Center. Nelson framed the group with the national motto, "out of many, one," and called them part of the "Artemis Generation."

Three of the four have flown before. Wiseman, 47, a Baltimore native and former Navy fighter pilot, logged 165 days on a 2014 station mission and led the astronaut office from 2020 to 2022. Glover, 46, born in Pomona, California, is a Navy captain who piloted SpaceX's Crew-1 and spent 167 days on the station in 2021, the first Black astronaut on a station crew. Koch, 44, born in Grand Rapids, Michigan, and raised in Jacksonville, North Carolina, holds the record for the longest single spaceflight by a woman, 328 days, and took part in the first all-female spacewalk during that 2019 stay. Hansen, 47, a Royal Canadian Air Force colonel from London, Ontario, has not yet launched; he has served as an aquanaut aboard the Aquarius underwater lab in 2014 and trained as a "cavenaut" with the European Space Agency a year earlier.

Hansen's seat comes through the Canada-U.S. Gateway Treaty, under which Canada will oversee and operate the external robotics for the planned Gateway platform in lunar orbit, and a Canadian astronaut will fly to Gateway on a later Artemis mission. He will be the first non-American to leave Earth orbit for the moon. He named two reasons he was smiling: American leadership, in choosing to build a global team when it could have gone alone, and Canada's "can do" attitude.

The mission is targeted for late 2024, launching on a Space Launch System rocket with the Orion capsule from Pad 39B at Kennedy Space Center. It will be the first flight of either vehicle with people aboard, and only the second launch of the pair after the uncrewed Artemis 1 test in 2022. The roughly 10-day flight will not orbit or land on the moon. Orion's European-built service module will raise its orbit around Earth through several maneuvers, then set the crew on a hybrid free return trajectory, in which Earth's gravity pulls the craft home after the lunar flyby.

Before departing Earth orbit, the crew will use the rocket's upper stage, the interim cryogenic propulsion stage, as a target for proximity operations, testing manual piloting of Orion. They will also check life support, communication and navigation systems. At closest approach they will pass within 6,479 miles (10,427 kilometers) of the lunar surface and travel 6,400 miles (10,300 km) beyond the far side, farther into deep space than any humans have gone. The flight ends with a Pacific splashdown off California, where Navy ships and NASA teams will recover the crew.

Hardware is progressing. In March, engineers finished integrating all five major structures of the SLS core stage, and Orion, its service module, the upper stage and the solid rocket segments are at Kennedy being prepared or awaiting stacking. Training now begins, first for the astronauts alone and later alongside the mission control team.

At the event, Wiseman asked the audience to repeat three words: "We are going." Glover described human spaceflight as a relay race, with the baton passed from Mercury through Apollo, the shuttle and the station to Artemis, and called the mission a step toward Mars. Koch turned the usual question around, saying she is absolutely excited and asking the crowd, "Are you excited?"

If all goes well, Artemis 3 would follow, landing the first woman and the next American near the moon's south pole as soon as late 2025. Competition exists: SpaceX has two privately funded Starship flights around the moon booked, including the dearMoon project, whose crew of eight artists was named in December 2022, and a flight planned by Dennis Tito and his wife. Their schedules are unsettled. If Artemis 2 flies first, the four will be the 25th through 28th humans to travel to the moon, following Apollo 8's Frank Borman, Jim Lovell and William Anders in 1968.