NASA reveals astronauts who will fly Artemis III, its next step toward a moon landing

NASA reveals astronauts who will fly Artemis III, its next step toward a moon landing

NASA’s Artemis III crew includes three NASA astronauts and one European Space Agency astronaut

On Tuesday NASA revealed the four astronauts who will crew its upcoming Artemis III mission —the agency’s critical next step toward landing humans back on the moon for the first time in more than 50 years.

The four astronauts who will fly on the mission, currently slated for 2027, are NASA astronauts Andre Douglas, Frank Rubio, and Randy Bresnik and European Space Agency astronaut Luca Parmitano.

Douglas is a spaceflight rookie who will serve as mission specialist alongside Rubio, who holds the record for the American with the longest spaceflight. Parmitano will be Artemis III ’s pilot, and Bresnik will be mission commander. Should any of the four need to pull out of the mission, there is a back-up crew member: NASA astronaut Bob Hines.

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According to NASA’s official timeline, Artemis III could launch as early as the second half of 2027, but many experts expect that schedule to slip. Originally conceived as the first U.S. crewed moon landing since 1972’s Apollo 17 , NASA overhauled the mission’s scope earlier this year to make it a test flight in low-Earth orbit. There the four astronauts will seek to rendezvous NASA’s Orion crew capsule with two separate Human Landing System (HLS) vehicles. In future Artemis missions, such HLS spacecraft will ferry crews from lunar orbit to the surface of the moon and back.

“ Artemis III is an incredibly exciting, complicated and highly coordinated multilaunch campaign. It’s going to happen in a short period of time with three of the world’s most powerful rockets,” said Jeremy Parsons, acting assistant deputy associate administrator for NASA’s Moon to Mars Program Office, at Tuesday’s announcement.