NASA names four astronauts who will fly around the Moon in 2024

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) announced on Monday the names of 4 crew members who, as part of the Artemis II lunar mission, will orbit the Moon in 2024.
It will be the first manned flight around the moon in 50 years. For the first time, the lunar crew will include a woman and an African American.
Christina Koch, 44, is an electrical engineer by profession. She holds the record for the longest continuous stay by a woman in space. She also participated in the first three spacewalks of female astronauts. Koch helped develop scientific instruments for several NASA missions.
Victor Glover, 46, a US Navy pilot, has completed 4 spacewalks and spent nearly six months aboard the ISS. He is named pilot of the Artemis II mission and will be the first African-American to fly to the moon.
The 3rd crew member is Canadian citizen Jeremy Hansen, Colonel of the Royal Canadian Air Force.
Reed Wiseman, a former US Navy pilot and veteran of previous ISS expeditions, has been named crew commander.
The four astronauts took part in the presentation of the lunar mission at Houston Johnson Space Center, NASA’s mission control base.
“The Artemis II crew includes thousands of people who work tirelessly to take us to the stars,” NASA Chief Bill Nelson said during the presentation. “It’s the team of all humanity.”
Artemis II will be the first crewed flight. This program succeeds the Apollo program and aims to bring American astronauts back to the lunar surface later this decade and eventually establish a base there that will serve as a springboard for future Mars exploration.
The initial Artemis I mission was successfully completed in December 2022, which launched a powerful next-generation mega-rocket and an uncrewed Orion capsule. The flight lasted 25 days.
The purpose of Artemis II’s 10-day trip around the moon and back, a distance of 2.3 million kilometers, is to demonstrate that all Orion survival vehicles and other systems will perform in deep space in accordance to design specifications and with astronauts on board.
Artemis II will fly about 10,300 km beyond the far side of the Moon before returning home. The last time American astronauts landed on the Moon was in December 1972, when Jean Cernan and Harrison Schmitt were on the Apollo 17 mission.
They were the last of 12 NASA astronauts to land on the moon in six Apollo missions since 1969.
The furthest distance from Earth that Artemis II will reach is expected to be over 370,000 km. For comparison, the typical height of the ISS’ low Earth orbit is about 420 km above the planet.
The crew of Artemis II, launched into Earth orbit on a NASA Space Launch System (SLS) two-stage rocket, will practice manual maneuvers with the Orion spacecraft before returning to ground control to additional tests and a flyby of the Moon.
Orion will loop around the Moon and then, using Earth and lunar gravity, send the spacecraft on a return flight that will last about four more days and end with a splashdown at sea.
If the mission is successful, NASA plans to land the first astronauts on the Moon, including a woman, in a few years. And then, as part of the Artemis III mission, to carry out regular crewed flights about once a year.
Compared to the Apollo program, founded during the US-Soviet Cold War space race, the Artemis program involves commercial partners, including Elon Musk’s SpaceX, and government space agencies in Canada, Europe and Japan.
The Artemis II mission also marks a major shift in NASA’s human spaceflight activities beyond low Earth orbit after decades of use of the Space Shuttle and the ISS.