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The astronauts who will lead the first crewed lunar mission in five decades were revealed Monday, lining up to begin training for the historic Artemis II lunar flyby scheduled to lift off in November 2024.
The astronauts are Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover and Christina Koch of NASA, as well as Jeremy Hansen of the Canadian Space Agency.
Wiseman is a 47-year-old decorated naval aviator and test pilot who was first selected as a NASA astronaut in 2009. A native of Baltimore, Maryland, he has already completed one spaceflight, a journey of 165 days to the International Space Station which had launched aboard a Russian Soyuz rocket in 2014. Most recently, Wiseman served as head of the astronaut office before resigning in November 2022, making him eligible for a mission flight.
Wiseman will serve as commander of the Artemis II mission.
Hansen, 47, is a fighter pilot selected by the Canadian Space Agency for astronaut training in 2009. Originally from London, Ontario, Hansen is one of four active Canadian astronauts and recently became the first Canadian to be given responsibility for training a new class of NASA astronauts.
He will be the first Canadian to travel into deep space.
Glover is a 46-year-old naval aviator who returned to Earth after his first spaceflight in 2021 after piloting the SpaceX crew’s second crewed flight. Dragon spacecraft and spends nearly six months aboard the International Space Station.
“It’s way more than the four names that were announced,” Glover said during Monday’s announcement at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston. “We must celebrate this moment in human history. …This is the next step in the journey that will take humanity to Mars.
Glover, born in Pomona, California, served in several military squadrons in the United States and Japan in the 2000s, and trained as a test pilot in the United States Air Force. When he was selected for NASA’s astronaut corps in 2013, he was working in the U.S. Senate as a legislative member. In total, Glover logged 3,000 flight hours in more than 40 aircraft, more than 400 arrested landings on aircraft carriers and 24 combat missions.
Glover’s first mission to space was as part of the SpaceX Crew-1 team, which launched to the International Space Station in November 2020 for a six-month stay in the orbiting laboratory.
Koch, 44, is a veteran of six spacewalks, including the first all-female spacewalk in 2019. She holds the record for the longest spaceflight by a woman, with a total of 328 days in space. Koch is also an electrical engineer who helped develop scientific instruments for several NASA missions. Koch, a native of Grand Rapids, Michigan, also spent a year at the South Pole, an arduous stay that may well prepare her for the intensity of a lunar mission.
The Artemis II mission will build on Artemis I, an uncrewed test mission that sent NASA’s Orion capsule on a 1.4 million mile journey to circle the moon that ended in December. The space agency considered this mission a success and is still working to review all the data collected.
If all goes according to plan, Artemis II will lift off around November 2024. The crew members, strapped inside the Orion spacecraft, will launch atop a NASA-developed Space Launch System rocket from Kennedy Space NASA Center in Florida.
The journey is expected to take approximately 10 days and will 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 liftoff and the relative distance of the Moon from Earth at the time of the mission,” NASA spokeswoman Kathryn Hambleton said by email.
After circling the Moon, the spacecraft will return to Earth for a landing in the Pacific Ocean.
Artemis II is expected to pave the way for the Artemis III mission later this decade, which NASA says will place the first woman and person of color on the lunar surface. It will also be the first time humans have landed on the Moon since the end of the Apollo program in 1972.
The Artemis III mission is expected to take off later this decade. But much of the technology the mission will need, including spacesuits to walk on the Moon and a lunar lander to transport astronauts to the Moon’s surface, is still in development.
NASA is targeting a 2025 launch date for Artemis III, although the space agency’s inspector general has previously said delays would likely push the mission back to 2026 or later.
The space agency has been seeking to return humans to the Moon for more than a decade. The Artemis program was designed to pave the way for establishing a permanent lunar outpost, allowing astronauts to live and work deeper in space for the long term, while NASA and its partners chart the path forward to send the first humans to Mars.
Vanessa Wyche, director of NASA’s Johnson Space Center, declined to provide details to CNN about the selection process. But she emphasized the diversity of Artemis II’s crew, which includes both men and women rather than just a team of white test pilots, as has been the case for historic missions of the past.
“I can tell you, they still have all the right pieces,” Wyche said. “We have different requirements than we had (when we) only had test pilots” during the inaugural missions.
Koch said in an interview with CNN’s Ed Lavandera that the group found out he had been selected a few weeks ago.
“We were all sent to a meeting that was on our calendar under a different pretext that didn’t seem as noble as it was going to be,” Koch said. “And by chance, two of us were very late for this meeting.”
She said the offer left her “speechless.”
“It’s truly an honor,” she added. “It’s an honor, not to go to space, but because it’s incredible to be part of this team going back to the Moon and Mars.”
An interview with the four astronauts will air Tuesday on “CNN This Morning,” starting at 6 a.m. ET.
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