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Astronauts who will direct the first mission of the Moon to the crew in five decades were revealed on Monday, queuing the quartet to start the formation for the historic Flyby Artemis II Lunar which should take off in November 2024.
The astronauts are Reid Wiseman of NASA, Victor Glover and Christina Koch, and Jeremy Hansen of the Canadian Space Agency.
Wiseman is a naval aviator and a 47 -year -old decorated test pilot who was selected for the first time to be an astronaut of NASA in 2009. Originally from Baltimore, Maryland, he finished a previous space flight, a 165 -day trip to the international space station which had launched a chief of astrona flight assignment.
Wiseman will serve as commander of the Artemis II mission.
Hansen, 47, is a fighter pilot who was selected by the Canadian Spatial Agency for Astronauts training in 2009. From London, Ontario, Hansen is one of the four active Canadian astronauts, and he recently became the first Canadian to be responsible for training for a new class of NASA astronauts.
He will be the first Canadian to go to deep space.
Glover is a 46 -year -old naval aviator who returned to earth from his first space flight in 2021 after piloting the second crew flight of the SpaceX crew Dragon Spacecraft and spending almost six months aboard the international space station.
“It is much more than the four names that were announced,” Glover said on Monday’s announcement at Nasa Johnson Space Center in Houston. “We have to celebrate this moment in human history. … This is the next stage of the trip that will bring humanity to Mars.”
Glover, born in Pomona, California, served in several military squadrons in the United States and Japan in the 2000s, and he finished the training of test pilot with the US Air Force. When he was selected for the body of NASA astronauts in 2013, he worked in the United States Senate as a legislative scholarship holder. All in all, Glover recorded 3,000 hours of flight in more than 40 planes, more than 400 carriers have stopped landings and 24 combat missions.
The first mission to Glover at Espace was part of the SpaceX Crew-1 team, which was launched at the international space station in November 2020 for a six-month stay at the orbit laboratory.
Koch, 44, is a veteran of six space balls – including the first entirely female space step in 2019. She holds the record for the longest space flight by a woman, with a total of 328 days in space. Koch is also an electrician engineer who has helped develop scientific instruments for several NASA mission. Koch, originally from Grand Rapids, Michigan, also spent a year at the South Pole, an arduous stay which could well prepare it for the intensity of a lunar mission.
The Artemis II mission will be based on Artemis I, an unrelated test mission which sent the NASA Orion capsule on a 1.4 million miles trip to travel the moon that ended in December. The space agency estimated that the mission is successful and still works to examine all the data collected.
If everything goes as planned, Artemis II will take off around November 2024. The crew members, attached inside the Orion spacecraft, will be launched at the top of a developed spatial launch rocket from NASA of Kennedy Space Center in NASA in Florida.
The trip should last about 10 days and send the crew beyond the moon, potentially further than any human has traveled in history, although the exact distance remains to be determined.
The “exact distance beyond the moon will depend on the day of takeoff and the relative distance of the Moon of the Earth at the time of the mission,” said NASA spokesperson Kathryn Hambleton, by e-mail.
After turning the moon, the spacecraft will come back to Earth for an a landing of splash in the Pacific Ocean.
Artemis II should pave the way for the Artemis III mission later this decade, that NASA swrooved the first woman and a person of color on the lunar surface. It will also mark the first time that humans have approached the moon since the end of the Apollo program in 1972.
The Artemis III mission should take off this decade later. But a large part of the technology that the mission will need, including space combinations to walk on the moon and a lunar to transport astronauts to the surface of the moon, is still in development.
NASA is targeting a launch date in 2025 for Artemis III, although the Inspector General of the Space Agency has already declared that delays will probably push the mission until 2026 or later.
The space agency has been looking to make people on the moon for more than a decade. The Artemis program was designed to open the way to the establishment of a permanent lunar outpost, allowing astronauts to live and work more deeply in long-term space as NASA and its partners map a path to sending the first humans to Mars.
Vanessa Wyche, director of the NASA Johnson Space Center, refused to provide details to CNN on the selection process. But she highlighted the diversity of the crew of Artemis II, which includes men and women rather than a white male test pilots as it was the case for the historical missions of the past.
“I can tell you, they always have all the right things,” said Wyche. “We have different requirements of what we have done (when) we have just tested pilots” on inaugural missions.
Koch said in an interview with Ed Lavandera de CNN that the group had discovered that they had been selected a few weeks ago.
“We were all sent to a meeting that was on our calendars under a different pretext that did not seem as high as the one that was going to be,” said Koch. “And accidentally two of us were very late in this meeting.”
She said that the offer made her “speechless”.
“It’s really an honor,” she added. “It is an honor – not to put myself in space – but because it is incredible to be part of this team that returns to the moon and on Mars.”
An interview with the four astronauts will be broadcast on “CNN this Morning” on Tuesday, which begins at 6 am.
