Secret Selection for the First Five-Dimensional Lunar Flight: Reid Wiseman, Artemis II, and Robert Behnken
Members of the crew who will helm the first moon mission in five decades were revealed on Monday, queuing up the quartet to begin training for their historic lunar flyby that is set to take off in November 2024.
The Artemis III mission is expected to take off later this decade. But much of the technology the mission will require, including spacesuits for walking on the moon and a lunar lander to ferry the astronauts to the moon’s surface, is still in development.
NASA officials plan to reveal the names of the crew members in a ceremony on Monday.
CNN spoke with a few current and former NASA officials about the selection process and they all admitted that it was a secret.
Reid Wiseman, a 47-year-old decorated naval aviator and test pilot who was first selected to be a NASA astronaut in 2009, is at the top of the list, according to CNN’s prior reporting.
Wiseman served as chief of the astronaut office until November 2022. While the chief is not permitted to fly while holding the post, they are able to wrangle the best flight assignments upon stepping down, an “acknowledged perk” of the job, according to former NASA astronaut Garrett Reisman.
Those criteria have not always been used for high-profile missions. Going back to the Gemini era, astronauts selected for inaugural crewed missions have been only White and male, and typically come from a background as a military test pilot — a profile notably characterized in the 1979 book “The Right Stuff” by Tom Wolfe.
That has held true through NASA’s most recent inaugural crewed flight, of SpaceX’s Crew Dragon capsule to the International Space Station in 2020, which included former military test pilots Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley.
And it may hold mostly true for the Artemis II mission as well: Nearly a dozen current and former NASA officials and astronauts told CNN they anticipated multiple test pilots being named.
The other spots will need to go to at least one woman and one person of color if a White man is selected.
Getting out of the Earth with Spacewalks: The longest single astronaut flight by a female, along the Moon with a male test pilot
The journey is expected to last about 10 days and will send the crew out beyond the moon, potentially further than any human has traveled in history, though the exact distance is yet to be determined.
The exact distance beyond the Moon will be determined by the day of liftoff and the relative distance of the Moon from the Earth.
Hansen, 47, is a fighter pilot who was selected by the Canadian Space Agency for astronaut training in 2009. He’s one of the few active Canadian astronauts, and recently became the firstCanadian to head training for a new class of NASA astronauts.
Glover is a 46-year-old naval aviator who returned to Earth from his first spaceflight in 2021 after piloting the second crewed flight of SpaceX’s Crew Dragon spacecraft and spending nearly six months aboard the International Space Station. The veteran of four spacewalks earned a master’s degree in engineering while moonlighting as a test pilot.
Christina Koch, 44, is a veteran of six spacewalks. She holds the record for the longest single spaceflight by a woman, with a total of 328 days in space. Koch is also an an electrical engineer who helped develop scientific instruments for multiple NASA mission. She’s also spent a year at the South Pole, an arduous stay that could well prepare her for the intensity of a moon mission.