In less than 5 days Artemis II is scheduled to launch towards the moon. It will carry the first 4 astronauts to escape Earth’s gravity since 1972’s Apollo 17 crew. These four brave souls will travel further from Earth than any human before aboard a brand new spacecraft. They’ll spend the mission testing all facets of the Orion capsule that will eventually take the first humans back to the lunar surface. Here’s a look at the four crew members.
Commander Reid Wiseman
Mission Commander Reid Wiseman was born in 1975 in Baltimore, Maryland. He has a Master’s Degree in Engineering and was selected to the astronaut program in 2009.
Wiseman was a Captain in the US Navy and did multiple tours to the middle east. Like many astronauts, he spent time as a test pilot during the mid-2000s and worked on both the F-35 Lightning and F/A-18 Hornet. After qualifying to be an astronaut in 2011, his first mission sent him to the Space Station for six months of 2014 during Expedition 40/41. Wiseman was selected as Commander for the Artemis II mission on April 3, 2023 and he will become the first lunar commander since Gene Cernan on Apollo 17 in 1972.
Pilot Victor Glover
Victor Glover is a native of Pomona, California where he was born in 1976. He has multiple Master’s certificates including Flight Test Engineering and Systems Engineering. Like Commander Wiseman, Glover is also a Captain in the US Navy and has logged over 3,000 flight hours. He also served as a Test Pilot in the Navy and goes by the callsign Ike, given to him by his first commander it stands for “I Know Everything”.
Glover was first accepted into the astronaut program in 2013 and he completed training in 2015. He lived on the International Space Station for more than six months during expedition 64/65. He was selected to be Pilot of the Artemis II Mission on April 3, 2023.
Mission Specialist Christina Koch
Christina Koch was born in Grand Rapids, Michigan in 1979. She is a graduate of North Carolina State University where she obtained a Masters in Electrical Engineering. She worked on the US Antarctic Program from 2004 to 2007 where she spent 2 overwinters in Antarctica and experienced temperatures as low a 111ºF below zero. She trained with Pilot Glover in the 2013 astronaut class which she completed in 2015.
Koch performed 6 EVAs during her nearly 1 year stay aboard the International Space Station from 2019 to 2020, including the first all-female EVA.
Mission Specialist Jeremy Hansen
Jeremy Hansen will become the first Canadian astronaut to travel around the moon. He was born in 1976 in London, Ontario and obtained a Master’s Degree in Physics from the Royal Military College in 2000.
Hansen has an interesting background with cavenaut training under the ESA, where they train astronauts in a simulated space environment underground. He has also served as an Aquanaut aboard the NEEMO 19 undersea mission for NASA.
Artemis II will be his first trip into space.
