NASA has selected these astronauts for the historic moon flyby mission
Secretive selection of the first astronaut aboard the Space Shuttle Mission: The case of Garrett Reisman, an old Navy test pilot, and the first flight assignment for a 2025 launch
The four people who will be in charge of the first moon mission in fifty years were revealed on Monday and will begin training for the historic flyby.
NASA is targeting a 2025 launch date for Artemis III, though the space agency’s inspector general has already said delays will likely push the mission to 2026 or later.
NASA officials plan to unveil the names of the crew members in a ceremony on Monday.
CNN spoke to a number of current and former NASA officials and astronauts to get their side of the story about the secretive selection process.
A decorated naval pilot and test pilot, he was first selected to be a NASAastronomer in 2009. He’s completed one prior spaceflight, a 165-day trip to the International Space Station that launched aboard a Russian Soyuz rocket in 2014. Most recently, Wiseman served as chief of the astronaut office before stepping down in November 2022, making him eligible for a flight assignment.
The office of the chief of the astronauts had a new leader in November of 2022, as noted by the above photo. While the chief is not permitted to fly while holding the post, they are able to wrangle the best flight assignments upon stepping down, an “acknowledged perk” of the job, according to former NASA astronaut Garrett Reisman.
Those criteria have not historically been the case for high-profile missions. Going back to the Gemini era, astronauts selected for inaugural crewed missions have been only White and male, and typically come from a background as a military test pilot — a profile notably characterized in the 1979 book “The Right Stuff” by Tom Wolfe.
That has held true through NASA’s most recent inaugural crewed flight, of SpaceX’s Crew Dragon capsule to the International Space Station in 2020, which included former military test pilots Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley.
And it may hold mostly true for the Artemis II mission as well: Nearly a dozen current and former NASA officials and astronauts told CNN they anticipated multiple test pilots being named.
However, if Wiseman, a White man, is selected, that means the other spots will almost certainly need to go to at least one woman and at least one person of color.
The Mission to the Moon: A Journey Beyond the Moon for a New Class of Space Astronauts and a Record for the Longest Space Flight by a Woman
The journey is expected to last about 10 days and will send the crew out beyond the moon, potentially further than any human has traveled in history, though the exact distance is yet to be determined.
The “exact 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,” NASA spokesperson Kathryn Hambleton said via email.
Hansen, 47, is a fighter pilot who was selected by the Canadian Space Agency for astronaut training in 2009. He is one of only four active Canadian astronauts, and he recently became the first Canadian to be put in charge of training for a new class of NASA astronauts.
After flying the secondcrewed flight of the Crew Dragon spaceship and spending nearly six months at the International Space Station, a 46-year-old naval aviator named Glover was able to return to Earth. The veteran of four spacewalks earned a master’s degree in engineering while moonlighting as a test pilot.
Christina Koch, 44, is a veteran of six spacewalks. She set a record for the longest spaceflight by a woman with 327 days in space. Koch is also an an electrical engineer who helped develop scientific instruments for multiple NASA mission. She’s also spent a year at the South Pole, an arduous stay that could well prepare her for the intensity of a moon mission.
