The astronaut crew for the next step of the Artemis III mission was announced Tuesday as NASA comes ever closer to its stated goal of landing back on the moon by 2028.
The four-member crew will be commanded by NASA astronaut Randy Bresnik with Luca Parmitano, an Italian astronaut with the European Space Agency, as pilot. NASA astronauts Andre Douglas, embarking on his first spaceflight and Frank Rubio, who holds the record for longest single spaceflight having spent 371 days aboard the International Space Station, will round out the team as mission specialists.
The two-week flight slated for 2027 will test out the new tech that will be vital for putting boots on the moon for the first time in more than half a century.
“My heart is so warm, it is so full,” Douglas said shortly after the announcement had been made.
Artemis III is slated to take place sometime in 2027. While it will be an important step toward getting back to the lunar surface, this flight will be occurring in low Earth orbit with the astronauts launching in the Orion spacecraft atop the enormous Space Launch System rocket, just as the previous Artemis II crew did earlier this year.
Once in orbit, the Orion is currently planning to practice docking with the two lunar landers constructed for Artemis, SpaceX’s Starship and Blue Origin’s Blue Moon Mark 2.
However, that depends on how things go for the development of either lander over the course of the next year. Both SpaceX and Blue Origin have been behind on their development timelines for their respective lunar landers. Blue Origin’s plan to be part of Artemis III is looking especially up in the air in the wake of the company’s New Glenn rocket explosion during a routine test last month, damaging the only launchpad the company currently has access to.
No matter which lander ends up being involved in Artemis III, the mission itself has already been significantly scaled back from what was originally charted out when NASA first announced its ambitious Artemis timeline.
While this mission was originally supposed to be moon-ward bound, NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman retooled the mission in a surprise move back in February to keep it closer to Earth, arguing that trying to get to the moon at this stage would be too much of a technological leap too soon. “We didn’t go right to Apollo 11,” Isaacman noted earlier this year. “We had a whole Mercury program [and] Gemini, lots of Apollo missions before we landed.”
Now, the main goal of this mission will be to work out all the kinks in docking and transferring from the Orion to the landers and back again “to reduce risk,” according to Isaacman, when the lunar landing, which NASA has slated for Artemis IV in 2028, actually occurs. To pull off this scaled back version of the mission, Artemis III’s crew is also looking at a truncated timeline for preparation. While the Artemis II crew had about three years of lead time (in part, it should be noted, due to a series of delays), Artemis III’s astronauts will have about a year, barring any delays.
The plan for the Artemis III mission is to start with Orion connecting up with Blue Origin’s Blue Moon first for about two days to allow the astronauts to test out the lander and its life support system. Then, the plan is to have Orion dock with SpaceX’s vehicle for about a day, according to Artemis program manager Jeremy Parsons, before the Orion returns to Earth, splashing down in the Pacific Ocean.
Whenever Artemis III does occur, there’s one thing it won’t have – any female astronauts. While NASA had pledged that the Artemis missions would see the first woman, the first person of color and the first non-American astronauts landing on the moon, that pledge disappeared from the federal space agency’s website shortly after President Donald Trump took office last year kicking off his administration’s moves against any programs focused on diversity, equity and inclusion. Now, the current roster features Douglas, who is Black, Rubio, who is of Salvadoran descent, and Parmitano, the first ESA astronaut on an Artemis mission, but no women.
Isaacman denied that there was any significance to this. “I don’t think anyone should be reading anything into this,” he said during Tuesday’s crew announcement, noting that NASA’s most recent astronaut class had more women than men selected and that NASA had “put forth the best astronauts to undertake and complete this mission.”
