NASA Introduces Crew Members for Historic Artemis II Lunar Flyby Mission

The Artemis Program Paves the Way for Human Exploration of Mars

        NASA has officially introduced the team of astronauts for its Artemis II lunar flyby mission. The mission, set for launch as early as next year, will mark the first crewed voyage around the Moon since the end of the Apollo era over 50 years ago. The announcement was made at NASA's mission control base in Houston, where officials from the Canadian Space Agency (CSA) also joined their US counterparts for the unveiling.

Artemis II will be the debut crewed flight of the Apollo successor program, the Artemis Program. The program aims to return astronauts to the Moon's surface by the end of this decade and establish a sustainable outpost there, creating a stepping stone to human exploration of Mars. The mission will cover a 10-day, 1.4-million-mile (2.3-million-km) journey around the Moon and back.

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The newly introduced crew will include the first Canadian astronaut for a Moon mission, as well as three Americans from a pool of 18 NASA astronauts selected for the Artemis program in 2020. The Artemis 18 group was chosen based on diversity, and the crew presented on Monday will most likely include not only the first woman but also the first person of colour assigned to a lunar mission.

        The kickoff Artemis I mission was successfully completed in December 2022, capping the inaugural launch of NASA's powerful next-generation mega-rocket and its newly built Orion spacecraft on an uncrewed test flight that lasted 25 days. The objective of the Artemis II flight is to demonstrate that all of Orion's life-support apparatus and other systems will operate as designed with astronauts aboard in deep space.

As planned, Artemis II will venture some 6,400 miles (10,300 km) beyond the far side of the Moon before returning, marking the closest pass that humans have made to Earth's natural satellite since Apollo 17, which carried Gene Cernan and Harrison Schmitt to the lunar surface in December 1972.

At its farthest distance from Earth, Artemis II is expected to reach a point more than 230,000 miles (370,000 km) away, compared to the typical low-Earth orbit altitude of the International Space Station, about 250 miles (420 km) above the planet.

The Artemis II crew will practice manual maneuvers with the Orion spacecraft before handing control of the capsule back to ground control for further tests and the lunar flyby portion of the mission. The outbound journey would culminate with Orion looping around the Moon, then using both the Earth's and the Moon's gravity to send the spacecraft on a propulsion-free return flight lasting about four more days, ending in a splashdown at sea.

If Artemis II is a success, NASA plans to follow up a few years later with the program's first lunar landing of astronauts, one of them a woman, on Artemis III, then continue with additional crewed missions about once a year.

Compared with the Apollo program, which was born of the Cold War-era U.S.-Soviet space race, Artemis is broader based, enlisting commercial partners such as Elon Musk's SpaceX and the government space agencies of Canada, Europe, and Japan. It also marks a major redirection of NASA's human spaceflight ambitions beyond low-Earth orbit after decades focused on its Space Shuttles and the International Space Station.

The Artemis program has been a major undertaking for NASA, and its success will pave the way for human exploration of Mars. With the introduction of the Artemis II crew, NASA has taken another significant step toward achieving that goal. The crew's diverse backgrounds.