Featured Image Credit: GREGG NEWTON / Contributor / Getty
When Artemis II lifts off from Kennedy Space Center, it will mark humanity's first crewed journey to the vicinity of the Moon in over 50 years.
The 10-day mission will carry its four-person crew around the Moon before splashing down in the Pacific Ocean. And while the science and engineering behind it are extraordinary, the people making the trip are just as remarkable.
None of the four astronauts was alive during the Apollo programme that first took humans to the Moon.
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Between them, they represent a generation of spaceflight that looks fundamentally different from anything that came before, including a woman, a person of colour and a non-American.
Meet the Artemis II crew!
Reid Wiseman is a retired Navy captain from Baltimore who is leading humanity's first lunar mission since 1972.
With complete sincerity, Wiseman admits the hardest thing he's ever done is solo-parenting his two daughters after the death of his wife in 2020. Wiseman was serving as NASA's chief astronaut when he was asked three years ago to take command of the Artemis II mission.
Navy captain and former combat pilot from Pomona, California, Victor Glover is one of NASA's few Black astronauts - and he is completely aware of what his place on this mission means to others.
'A force for good' is how Glover describes his place in the crew, calling the opportunity 'an amazing blessing and a privilege' and expressing hope that his involvement will offer inspiration to people who might not have previously seen themselves reflected in space exploration.
With an early SpaceX crew run to the International Space Station behind him, Glover finds himself in new personal territory.
His focus is 'running our best race' so that the results of the Artemis programme can be passed on smoothly to the missions that follow.
Meanwhile, mission specialist Christina Koch holds the record for the longest single spaceflight ever completed by a woman, 328 consecutive days aboard the International Space Station. She also took part in the first-ever all-female spacewalk during that same mission in 2019.
"It's about celebrating the fact that we've arrived to this place in history," she said.
The Canadian Space Agency astronaut is making his spaceflight debut on arguably the most high-profile mission in a generation.
"Maybe I'm naive, but I don't feel a lot of personal pressure," he noted.
The fighter pilot and physicist was selected as a CSA astronaut back in 2009 and was named to the Artemis II crew in 2023.
"When I walk out and I look at the Moon now, it looks and feels a little bit farther than it used to be," he added. "I just understand in the details how much harder it is than I thought it was, watching videos of it."
