The four astronauts will now begin training for the historic Artemis II lunar flyby, which is scheduled to launch in November 2024. This will be the first crewed moon trip in fifty years.
The astronauts are Jeremy Hansen of the Canadian Space Agency, Victor Glover, Christina Koch, and Reid Wiseman of NASA.
Wiseman, an accomplished test pilot and navy aviator who is 47 years old, was first chosen to be a NASA astronaut in 2009. He is a native of Baltimore, Maryland, and has been into space once before, completing a 165-day mission to the International Space Station in 2014. Wiseman most recently worked as the astronaut office’s chief until resigning in November 2022 and becoming qualified for a flying assignment.
The mission’s commander, Wiseman, will lead Artemis II.
The Canadian Space Agency chose Hansen, a 47-year-old combat pilot, for astronaut training in 2009. Hansen, a native of London, Ontario, is one of only four active Canadian astronauts and was just appointed as the nation’s first astronaut trainer for a fresh batch of NASA astronauts.
He will make history as the first Canadian to visit the deep space.
The second crewed voyage of SpaceX’s Crew Dragon was piloted by 46-year-old navy aviator Glover, who made his first trip into space in 2021. Glover spent over six months on the International Space Station.
During the announcement on Monday at the NASA Johnson Space Center in Houston, Glover remarked, “It’s so much more than the four names that have been announced.” “This period in human history ought to be honoured. It is the following phase in the process of getting people to Mars.
In the 2000s, Glover, a Pomona, California native, served in a number of military squadrons in both the US and Japan. He also successfully completed test pilot training with the US Air Force. He was a legislative fellow for the US Senate until he was chosen in 2013 to join the NASA astronaut corps. Glover completed 24 combat missions, over 400 carrier arrested landings, and 3,000 total flying hours in over 40 different aircraft.
Glover’s first trip into space was as a member of the SpaceX Crew-1 crew, which launched in November 2020 to the International Space Station for a six-month stay.
Six spacewalks have been completed by Koch, 44, including the first all-female spacewalk in 2019. With 328 days in space, she holds the record for the longest solo spaceflight by a woman. Koch is also an electrical engineer who assisted in the creation of research instruments for a number of NASA missions. Koch, a Grand Rapids, Michigan native, also spent a year at the South Pole; this rigorous time there may have helped Koch prepare for the rigours of a moon journey.
Regarding this mission
The Artemis II mission will build on Artemis I, an unmanned test mission that culminated in December after sending NASA’s Orion spacecraft on a 1.4 million-mile journey to orbit the moon. That mission was judged successful by the space agency, which is still reviewing all of the data that was gathered.
If all goes according to plan, Artemis II will launch in late November 2024. The crew members will launch aboard a Space Launch System rocket from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida while they are secured inside the Orion capsule.
Although the precise distance has not yet been calculated, the trip is anticipated to take around 10 days and will transport the crew beyond the moon, possibly further than any person has ever travelled.
According to NASA spokesperson Kathryn Hambleton via email, the precise distance beyond the Moon “will depend on the day of liftoff and the relative distance of the Moon from the Earth at the time of the mission.”
The spacecraft will circle the moon before returning to Earth and splashing down in the Pacific Ocean.
Artemis II is anticipated to pave the way for Artemis III, which NASA has promised will send the first woman and person of colour on the lunar surface, later this decade. Also, it will be the first time since the Apollo program’s conclusion in 1972 that people have set foot on the moon.
Later this decade, the Artemis III mission is anticipated to launch. However, a lot of the equipment needed for the expedition, such as lunar landers to transport the astronauts to the moon’s surface and spacesuits for walking on the moon, is still under development.
The launch of Artemis III is scheduled for 2025, but the inspector general of the space agency has already stated that delays will probably cause the mission to be delayed until 2026 or later.
For more than ten years, the space agency has been working to send people back to the moon. In order to enable astronauts to live and work longer in space while NASA and its partners chart a course towards bringing the first people to Mars, the Artemis programme was created.
selecting astronauts
The director of NASA’s Johnson Space Center, Vanessa Wyche, denied to give CNN any information regarding the selection procedure. Nonetheless, she stressed that the Artemis II crew is diverse and consists of both men and women as opposed to just a team of White male test pilots, as has typically been the case for historic missions in the past.
They still all possess the proper qualities, I can assure you of that, Wyche stated. During the first missions, “We have criteria different from (when) we merely had test pilots.”
In an interview with CNN’s Ed Lavandera, Koch said that the group had recently learned that they had been chosen.
‘On a different pretence that didn’t sound as high as the one it was going to be, we were all dispatched to a meeting that was on our calendars,’ Koch claimed. And unintentionally, two of us arrived at the meeting rather late.
The offer, she claimed, left her “speechless.”
She continued, “That truly is an honour.” It’s a privilege to be a member of the crew that will return to the moon and travel to Mars, not because I want to go into space.