NASA will select four astronauts, including three Americans and one Canadian, to carry out a historic journey to the moon’s orbit, sending people back further into space than they have been in the past fifty years.
The identity of the crew members will ultimately be made public on Monday.
The first crewed mission of the program, Artemis II, is slated to launch in 2024 and will be the first human spaceflight since the Apollo program to orbit the moon.
NASA walk on the moon in 2025
It will open the door for the Artemis III crew to land on the moon in 2025 while riding the most potent rocket in existence at a cost of close to $100 billion.
NASA officials intend to announce the names of the crew members in a ceremony slated for Monday at 11 am EST after months of behind-closed-doors decision-making.
CNN previously interviewed almost a dozen current and former NASA officials and astronauts to lift the lid on the secretive selection process, despite the fact that officials have stayed mum about their selections.
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The NASA astronauts
Reid Wiseman, a 47-year-old accomplished navy aviator and test pilot who was initially selected to be a NASA astronaut in 2009, is at the top of the list.
Wiseman is one of several candidates at the top of the list, according to people familiar with the process who also spoke to CNN:
- Victor Glover, a 46-year-old navy aviator, returned to Earth after his maiden spaceflight in 2021 after piloting SpaceX’s Crew Dragon’s second crewed voyage and spending over six months on the International Space Station. Test pilot and four-time spacewalker got a master’s degree in engineering.
- Randy Bresnik, 55, a decorated naval aviator and test pilot, flew combat missions during Operation Iraqi Freedom. He flew two Space Shuttle and Soyuz trips to the International Space Station. Since 2018, Bresnik has handled the astronaut office’s creation and testing of all rockets and spacecraft for Artemis missions, making him a prime candidate.
- Anne McClain, 43, is a veteran army pilot and West Point graduate who flew over 200 combat missions in support of Operation Iraqi Freedom and graduated from the US Naval Test Pilot School in 2013, the same year she became a NASA astronaut. She led two spacewalks after embarking on a Russian Soyuz spacecraft in 2018.
- The senior astronaut is Stephanie Wilson. The 56-year-old mission specialist on three Space Shuttle flights, including the first after the 2003 Columbia disaster that killed seven astronauts, joined NASA’s 1996 astronaut class.
- Christina Koch, 44, has six spacewalks. The longest female spaceflight was 328 days. Koch developed scientific instrumentation for NASA missions as an electrical engineer. A year at the South Pole may have prepared her for a moon trip.
- 45-year-old biologist Jessica Meir has a Scripps Institute of Oceanography PhD. She spent days in an underwater research facility on a 2002 NASA Extreme Environment Mission Operations (NEEMO) trip and two weeks caving in Italy in 2016.
The second phase of NASA’s 21st-century new moon program is called Artemis II.
It follows Artemis I, an unmanned mission that launched in November 2022 and successfully made a full orbit of the moon 25 days later.
In 2024, Artemis II is expected to launch.
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