Mission Moon: NASA’s Crew List Includes A Woman, Person of Colour Among 4 Astronauts

The crew list assigned for the Artemis-II mission set to launch in 2024 from the United States includes -- Christina Koch, Victor Glover, Reid Wiseman, and Jeremy Hansen.

NASA Names Artemis Astronauts: NASA on Monday announced its four-member crew for the upcoming lunar mission which includes a woman and an African American astronaut for the first time. The mission is likely to commence as early as next year. This will be the second voyage around the moon in more than 50 years which took place in the year 1972. The four astronauts were selected from a pool of 18 astronauts. The crew list assigned for the Artemis-II mission set to launch in 2024 from the United States includes — Christina Koch, Victor Glover, Reid Wiseman, and Jeremy Hansen.

They’re going to the Moon! Introducing the #Artemis II astronauts:

Reid Wiseman (@astro_reid), Commander
Victor Glover (@AstroVicGlover), Pilot
Christina Koch (@Astro_Christina), Mission specialist
Jeremy Hanson (@Astro_Jeremy), Mission specialisthttps://t.co/Hy1110MOEi pic.twitter.com/SeETL5iURu

— NASA’s Johnson Space Center (@NASA_Johnson) April 3, 2023

Notably, Christina Koch, an engineer who already holds the record for the longest continuous spaceflight by a woman was named as a mission specialist.

“It is an honour to be here. When I think about this mission, it’s so awesome in itself. We are going to ride the world’s most powerful rocket and we will reach peaks of thousands of miles and test all the systems and then we will head to the Moon,” Koch said after her name was announced.

The Artemis II quartet were introduced at a televised news conference in Houston at the Johnson Space Center, NASA’s mission control base.

The mission will mark the debut crewed flight – but not the first lunar landing – of an Apollo successor program aimed at returning astronauts to the moon’s surface later this decade and ultimately establishing a sustainable outpost there, creating a stepping stone to future human exploration of Mars.

Objective Of Artemis II Mission

The mission’s key objective is to demonstrate that all of Orion’s life-support apparatus and other systems will operate as designed with astronauts aboard in deep space. Artemis II aims to venture some 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.