In just two days, four astronauts could launch toward the moon for the first time in more than 50 years.
The crew, NASA astronauts Reid Wiseman, Christina Koch and Victor Glover and Canadian astronaut Jeremy Hansen, are set to fly on NASA’s Artemis II mission, a 10-day journey that will take them swinging around the moon. Their path through space could send the group farther from Earth than any human has ever ventured, surpassing the Apollo 13 distance record of 248,655 miles set in 1970.
Though the astronauts will not land on the moon’s surface, the flight is meant to kick-start a new era of lunar exploration, paving the way for a targeted moon landing in two years. The Artemis II mission will mark the first time that NASA’s Space Launch System rocket and Orion capsule carry human passengers.
If that’s cause for any trepidation, the astronauts haven’t let it show.
“The four of us, we are ready to go. The team is ready to go. The vehicle is ready to go,” Wiseman said Sunday in a media briefing from Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida.
Following some starts and stops over the last few months — NASA had to forego launch opportunities in February and March to make last-minute repairs to the rocket — Wiseman and the rest of the crew entered quarantine in Houston on March 18, a standard preflight procedure to ensure the astronauts remain healthy before their mission. They arrived in Florida on Friday.
Wiseman will command the Artemis II mission, with Glover serving as pilot and Koch and Hansen as mission specialists. NASA announced the astronauts’ selection in 2023.
“Among the crew are the first woman, first person of color, and first Canadian on a lunar mission,” Vanessa Wyche, director of NASA’s Johnson Space Center, said at the time. “And all four astronauts will represent the best of humanity as they explore for the benefit of all.”
The three NASA astronauts on the mission are spaceflight veterans. Wiseman, who previously served in the Navy and became an astronaut in 2009, spent six months aboard the International Space Station in 2014.
Since losing his wife in 2020, Wiseman has been raising their two children on his own. Being an astronaut, he said, puts a lot of stress and anxiety on family members, and his excitement about the mission is often tempered by feelings of selfishness for the toll it takes on loved ones.
“I’m a single father of two daughters,” he told NBC’s “TODAY” show in an interview with his fellow crew members in January. “It’d be a lot easier just to sit on my couch and watch football for the weekend, but at the same time, there’s four humans that were put in a position to be able to go explore and do something that is very unique and rare in this civilization.”
Wiseman added that he hopes the outcome of the mission will justify the sacrifices his loved ones have made.
“We’ve always looked at the moon and said, ‘We’ve been there.’ But for this whole generation, for our generation, for the younger generation, for the Artemis generation, they’re going to look at the moon now and go, ‘We are there,’” he said.
All four astronauts plan to bring small tokens and mementos on their flight around the moon. Wiseman and Koch said they each plan to carry letters from their families. Glover said he is bringing a Bible, his wedding rings and heirlooms for his daughters. For Hansen, it’s a moon pendant with his family’s birth stones and the words “moon and back” engraved.
Such items, having flown in space, make for special keepsakes and are a way for the astronauts to include their family members in the journey.
Koch is no stranger to extended stints in space, nor to historic firsts. She spent almost all of 2019 on the International Space Station — 328 days — the record for the longest single spaceflight by a woman. While there, Koch and fellow astronaut Jessica Meir performed NASA’s first all-female spacewalk.
She said she visited NASA’s Kennedy Space Center with her family when she was 10 or 11 years old.
“I often cite that trip as what cemented my interest in the space program,” Koch said in the Sunday briefing. “I came home with a couple posters from the gift shop, and it had been a dream of mine ever since.”
She said she isn’t bothered that another major milestone — leaving bootprints on the lunar surface — will elude her.
“I will be so excited to see someone I know get assigned to be the person and people to walk on the moon, but if it isn’t in my space destiny to do that, that’s just fine with me,” Koch said. (NASA has not yet named the astronaut crew that it plans to land on the moon during a future Artemis mission in 2028.)
Glover, meanwhile, was on the first operational flight of SpaceX’s Crew Dragon capsule to the space station in 2020. A former U.S. Navy captain and test pilot, Glover was serving as a legislative fellow in the U.S. Senate when NASA recruited him. He was selected to become an astronaut in 2013.
Glover and his wife have four children.
“Our families have been along for this entire journey, the third quarantine of this series, and all the years of training and the travel, and they’re here now,” Glover told reporters on Sunday.
Hansen, the only crew member making his spaceflight debut, will also hold the distinction of being the first Canadian to venture to the moon. Selected by the Canadian Space Agency to become an astronaut in 2009, he was previously a fighter pilot and colonel in the Canadian Armed Forces.
Hansen and his wife have three children. After years of training for this flight, he said, the crew members have also become “like a family at this point.”
Artemis II will be just the second outing for NASA’s Space Launch System rocket and Orion capsule. The first was the uncrewed Artemis I flight around the moon more than three years ago.
Wiseman, Koch, Glover and Hansen know that their mission is a critical stepping stone for NASA’s efforts to return to the moon. During the journey, the crew members are tasked with demonstrating docking procedures in Earth’s orbit, conducting science experiments and testing various systems aboard the Orion capsule as a kind of trial run for future Artemis missions.
The next one, the Artemis III mission in 2027, will conduct technology demonstrations in low-Earth orbit, including testing out how a moon lander built by SpaceX or Blue Origin will dock with the Orion capsule. NASA’s moon-landing plan calls for astronauts to transfer to that other vehicle while orbiting the moon, then use it to descend to the lunar surface.
In 2028, NASA plans for the Artemis IV mission to land astronauts on the moon.
Koch said her goal is to contribute to the longevity of the Artemis program, laying the foundation for a sustained human presence on the moon.
“Success is Artemis 100, whenever that is,” she said. “And we really define everything off of that.”
