NASA
NASA on Monday hosted the kind of celebratory event it’s wanted to hold for five decades: the appointment of a new crew to fly to the moon.
The Artemis II mission will fly four astronauts around the moon in about a week’s flight. This will be the first time humans have left low Earth orbit since December 1972, at the end of the Apollo 17 mission.
“It’s been more than half a century since astronauts traveled to the moon,” NASA Administrator Bill Nelson said Monday. “That’s going to change.”
Nelson then announced the crew of the Artemis II: Commander Reid Wiseman, a naval aviator and veteran astronaut; Pilot Victor Glover, a test pilot who flew on the first operational Crew Dragon flight; Mission Specialist Christina Hammock Koch, an engineer who holds the record for the longest space flight by a woman; and mission specialist Jeremy Hansen, a Canadian physicist who will be the first non-American to fly into space.
NASA held the crew announcement in a large, packed hangar at South Houston’s Ellington Airport. It was a rough, joyful event for the spaceflight community in Houston, which was going through a rough patch after the retirement of the space shuttle in 2011.
The Apollo astronauts lived and trained here. The Apollo missions were flown from here. And even during the three decades of space shuttle missions, there was a regular cadence of flights to prepare and astronauts to train. But for most of the past 12 years — until SpaceX started flying Crew Dragon — NASA astronauts have often spent as much time training in Russia as they do in Houston, having gone into space on Russian rockets.
NASA is back
But NASA is back, in a big way. As part of Monday’s announcement, most of the agency’s dozen astronauts paraded on stage. Many had come to NASA hoping to fly back to the moon one day. The International Space Station is great, but these men and women were explorers at heart. They wanted to go bold, and that meant going beyond low Earth orbit. Now they are starting to go.
“This is a big day,” said Glover, the mission’s pilot. “We have much to celebrate. Humanity has much to celebrate. Artemis II is more than a mission to the moon and back. It is the next step on the journey that will take humanity to Mars. This crew will never forget that.”
NASA completed the Artemis I test flight of its Space Launch System rocket and Orion spacecraft late last year, a precursor to the flight to put humans on those vehicles. With Artemis II, the crew of four will launch on the SLS rocket and spend about 24 hours in an elliptical orbit around Earth before Orion fires its engines to put the spacecraft on a “free return trajectory” around the moon. This means that once Orion has fired up its engines, it’s determined to fly around the moon, within about 6,000 miles of its surface, before returning to Earth.
Artemis II could fly as early as late 2024, but it’s more likely to happen in the first half of 2025. Success on this flight will pave the way for Artemis III, which will land two astronauts on the surface of the moon. Ultimately, NASA is aiming to fly regular missions to the moon starting in the late 2020s, learning how to live and work in deep space before finally — as Glover said — trying to make a human landing on Mars.
Mars remains far away, with only fictitious schedules and unfunded budgets. But now the Artemis II mission will undoubtedly continue. The appointment of a real crew, with all the associated pomp and circumstance, sets this flight on an inexorable path to launch. For example, flight suits can now be custom-made for each astronaut and they begin an intensive 18-month mission profile training period.
This is a crew with many firsts. Koch will be the first woman to fly into space. Glover is the first minority. And Hansen is the first person from outside the United States.
We continue with Apollo
There are several meaningful ways in which the Artemis program differs from its predecessor. Artemis is trying to get to the moon with a sense of permanence instead of flying half a dozen missions to the lunar surface. The new program is also driven in part by a commercial space industry that didn’t exist until recently.
But perhaps the most important way Artemis differs from Apollo is in its international reach to other countries. More than two dozen countries have signed “agreements” to join the Artemis program. The lunar initiative builds on partnerships developed by NASA and the US government to fly the International Space Station.
This approach creates international goodwill, and the strong international ties also make NASA programs less susceptible to cancellation by new presidents or congresses.
“You can’t go 250,000 miles from Earth and look back at it and go man, I wish we’d gone alone,” Wiseman, the crew commander, said in an interview. “No, you look back and say, ‘I’m so glad we’re doing this internationally.’ “Jeremy is working on this. We’ll have Europeans, Japanese astronauts and hopefully someone from the UAE down the road. I really hope this is just the beginning.”
