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The astronauts who will lead the first manned lunar mission in five decades were revealed Monday, putting the quartet in line to begin training for the historic Artemis II lunar flyby scheduled to lift off in November 2024.
The astronauts are Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover and Christina Koch of NASA, and Jeremy Hansen of the Canadian Space Agency.
Wiseman is a decorated 47-year-old naval aviator and test pilot who was first selected to be a NASA astronaut in 2009. The Baltimore, Maryland, native has already completed one spaceflight, a 165-day trip to the International Space Station that launched aboard a Russian Soyuz rocket in 2014. Most recently, Wiseman served as chief of the Astronaut Office before stepping down in November 2022, making him eligible for a flight assignment.
Wiseman will serve as commander of the Artemis II mission.
Hansen, 47, is a fighter pilot who was selected by the Canadian Space Agency for astronaut training in 2009. Originally from London, Ont., Hansen is one of only four active Canadian astronauts and recently became the first Canadian to be tasked with training a new class of NASA astronauts.
He will be the first Canadian to travel into deep space.
Glover is a 46-year-old naval aviator who returned to Earth from his first spaceflight in 2021 after piloting SpaceX’s second manned Crew flight. The Dragon spacecraft spent nearly six months aboard the International Space Station.
“This is much more than the four names that have been announced,” Glover said during the announcement Monday at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston. “We need to celebrate this moment in human history. … This is the next step in humanity’s journey to Mars.”
Born in Pomona, California, Glover served in several military squadrons in the United States and Japan in the 2000s and trained as a test pilot in the U.S. Air Force. When he was selected to join NASA’s astronaut corps in 2013, he was working in the U.S. Senate as a legislative commissioner. In total, Glover has logged 3,000 flight hours in more than 40 aircraft, more than 400 carrier landings and 24 combat missions.
Glover’s first mission in space was as part of the SpaceX Crew-1 team, which launched to the International Space Station in November 2020 for a six-month stay in the orbiting laboratory.
Koch, 44, has already completed six spacewalks, including the first all-female spacewalk in 2019. She holds the record for the longest spaceflight by a woman, with a total of 328 days in space. Koch is also an electrical engineer and has helped develop scientific instruments for several NASA missions. Koch, a native of Grand Rapids, Michigan, also spent a year at the South Pole, a grueling stint that could help prepare her for the intensity of a lunar mission.
The Artemis II mission will build on Artemis I, an uncrewed test mission that took NASA’s Orion capsule on a 1.4-million-mile (2.2-million-kilometer) trip around the moon, which ended in December. The space agency deemed that mission a success and is still working to analyze all the data it collected.
If all goes according to plan, Artemis II will lift off around November 2024. The crew members, strapped inside the Orion spacecraft, will be launched atop a NASA-developed Space Launch System rocket from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida.
The journey is expected to last around 10 days and will send the crew beyond the Moon, potentially further than any human has ever travelled in history, although the exact distance has yet to be determined.
“The exact distance beyond the Moon will depend on the day of liftoff and the Moon’s relative distance from Earth at the time of the mission,” NASA spokeswoman Kathryn Hambleton said in an email.
After orbiting the Moon, the spacecraft will return to Earth for a landing in the Pacific Ocean.
Artemis II is expected to pave the way for the Artemis III mission later this decade, which NASA says will see the first woman and first person of color set foot on the lunar surface. It will also be the first time humans have set foot on the moon since the Apollo program ended in 1972.
The Artemis III mission is expected to launch later this decade. But much of the technology needed for the mission, including spacesuits to walk on the moon and a lunar lander to carry astronauts to the moon’s surface, is still under development.
NASA is targeting a 2025 launch of Artemis III, though the space agency’s inspector general has previously said delays would likely push the mission to 2026 or later.
The space agency has been seeking to send humans back to the moon for more than a decade. The Artemis program was designed to pave the way for a permanent lunar outpost, allowing astronauts to live and work deeper in space in the long term, while NASA and its partners chart a path toward sending the first humans to Mars.
Vanessa Wyche, director of NASA’s Johnson Space Center, declined to provide CNN with details about the selection process. She did, however, emphasize the diversity of the Artemis II crew, which includes both men and women rather than a team of white test pilots as has been the case for historic missions in the past.
“I can tell you they still have all the elements they need,” Wyche said. “Our requirements are different than when we had just test pilots” for the inaugural missions.
Koch said in an interview with CNN’s Ed Lavandera that the group found out he had been selected a few weeks ago.
“We were all sent to a meeting that was on our calendar under some other pretext that didn’t seem as ambitious as the one that was scheduled,” Koch said. “And by accident, two of us were very late to that meeting.”
She said the offer left her “speechless.”
“It’s a real honor,” she added. “It’s an honor, not just because I’m in space, but because it’s incredible to be part of this team that’s going back to the Moon and Mars.”
An interview with the four astronauts will air on “CNN This Morning” Tuesday, starting at 6 a.m. ET.
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