Astronauts Picked For First Moon Mission In Over 50 Years

 

All systems go:

NASA and the Canadian Space Agency announced Monday the four astronauts who will partake in the next Artemis mission and fly around the moon.

The Artemis II team will be made up of three Americans -- Victor Glover, Christina Hammock Koch and Reid Wiseman -- and one Canadian, Jeremy Hansen.

The team includes the Koch as first woman and Glover as the first person of color who will eventually go on to step foot on the lunar surface. Glover will be the pilot of the spacecraft and Wiseman will be the commander of Artemis II.  [snip]

Artemis II is scheduled to send four astronauts into space in 2024 for a lunar flyby before returning to Earth.

It will be the first crewed mission aboard NASA's new Orion spacecraft and the first to launch on the agency's new heavy-lift rocket, the Space Launch System. [snip]

The mission will take approximately 10 days, but the system will need to undergo massive amounts of testing first to make sure it can support humans living and working in deep space, NASA said.

The following Artemis mission (III) will send 4 astronauts to land on the moon in 2025, and Artemis IV will follow in 2027 with a second Moon landing.

The last manned mission to the Moon was Apollo 17, which occurred from December 7-19, 1972.

Great countries do great things.

(Image:  Astronauts Glover, Hansen, Koch and Wiseman/ AP)