Artemis 2 will be NASA’s first mission to launch a woman and a black person on a lunar mission. Today is the announcement by the US space agency of the crew of the expedition that should leave the Kennedy Space Center in November 2024 or at the beginning of 2025 at the latest. With two absolute firsts. Reid Wiseman is a US Air Force pilot who was also the head of NASA’s cosmonaut office for some time. However, it is not the first time for him in space: he had already spent a few weeks on the International Space Station (ISS) in 2014. A “first fruits”, however, that of Christina Koch. An electronic engineer, she also already holds a record: she is the woman to have been in space the longest for a continuous period, 328 days. Together with Jessica Meir, she was also the protagonist of the first all-female spacewalk. Victor Glover is also in the planned team: previously an Air Force approval pilot, he has worked for NASA since 2013 and left for his first space trip in 2020. He was the first African American to inhabit the ISS for at least six months. Finally, Jeremy Hanson: before joining the Canadian space agency he was a pilot in the Canadian air force. It will be his first time ever in space.
“The Artemis Generation”
“The Artemis-2 crew represents thousands of people who work tirelessly to take us to the stars. This is their crew, this is our crew, this is humanity’s crew,” said NASA Administrator Bill Nelson. “NASA astronauts Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover and Christina Hammock Koch and CSA astronaut Jeremy Hansen each have their own story, but together they represent our credo: E number one – come on many, one. Together, we are ushering in a new era of exploration for a new generation of stargazers and dreamers: the Artemis Generation,” added Nelson. In selecting one woman and one black person to join the team, NASA is fulfilling a promise to increase the diversity of the teams that go on her missions.
The mission objective
From here to the departure of the mission, at the end of 2024 or the beginning of 2025, the selected astronauts will be engaged in a period of intense training. The selected team will not land directly on the Moon, but will pave the way for a subsequent moon landing mission, the first for 50 years. Artemis 1, between November and December 2022, thanks to the boarding of three dummies equipped with sensors, tested what humans could face when they set off to reconquer the lunar surface. The other two phases envisaged in the program will follow: Artemis 2, which will reach lunar orbit, and finally Artemis 3, which foresees the return of astronauts to the soil of the Moon after more than half a century. The landing is not the only goal of the mission: the intention is to lay the foundations for building a stable outpost on the satellite. A sort of base that in the future could prepare the ground for further explorations, including that of Mars.
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