Artemis II mission crew (left to right): Christina Koch, Reed Weisman (seated), Victor Glover, Jeremy Hansen
NASA
NASA has selected astronauts for its planned Artemis II mission in late 2024. The mission will take his four-man crew around the Moon, the first humans to do so since the 1972 Apollo 17 mission. .
The mission commander is Reid Wiseman, who was NASA’s chief astronaut until November 2022. He has been to space once before traveling to the International Space Station (ISS) in his 2014.
The pilot is Victor Glover. He flew to his ISS in 2020 aboard his SpaceX Crew-1 mission. This is the commercial crew program’s first operational mission and test his pilot on the job.
Two mission specialists will be assigned to serve as blanket positions for astronauts who do not command or pilot missions. The first is Christina Koch, who holds the record for the longest space flight by a woman, from 2018 to early 2019 she spent 328 days in space. The second is Jeremy Hansen, one of four active Canadian astronauts. He will be the only crew member to make the first flight into space on Artemis II.
“Manned spaceflight is like a relay race, and the baton has been passed from generation to generation and crew to crew,” Glover said in a statement. “When we are given the privilege of taking that baton, we will do our best to have a good race.”
The Artemis II mission lasts about 10 days, with astronauts launched into space aboard NASA’s giant Space Launch System (SLS) rocket and orbiting the weak Earth for two days before heading to the moon. It will not enter lunar orbit. One of the primary reasons for the mission is to fully test life support systems and spacecraft operations.
The Artemis II crew travels 370,000 kilometers from Earth. The record distance for deep space travel is held by the Apollo 13 mission, which traveled 400,171 kilometers.
After orbiting the moon, the crew of Artemis II returns home. If all goes well, this mission will be the final step before her planned 2025 return of humans to the moon.
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