Nasa mission
“Artemis 2”: Three men and a woman fly around the moon
NASA astronauts Christina Koch (lr), Victor Glover and Reid Wiseman and astronaut Jeremy Hansen from the Canadian Space Agency. photo
© Josh Valcarcel/Nasa/dpa
NASA is back to manned moon missions – in the coming year, for the first time in decades, people will orbit the moon. Now it’s clear who will be part of the crew.
Three men and a woman are to fly around the moon with the “Artemis 2” mission of the US space agency Nasa. These are the US astronaut Christina Koch, her US colleagues Victor Glover and Reid Wiseman and the Canadian astronaut Jeremy Hansen, as NASA announced on Monday. The four astronauts would be the first people to be near the moon since the astronauts of the “Apollo 17” mission set foot on the moon in 1972 for some time. The “Artemis 2” mission is currently scheduled for November 2024.
“We need to celebrate this moment in human history,” Glover said shortly after the announcement. “It’s more than a mission. It’s the next step in the journey that will take humanity to Mars and this crew will never forget that.” Glover would be the first non-white person to board a NASA moon mission, Koch the first woman and Hansen the first Canadian. It would be the second flight into space for Glover, Koch and Wisemann and the first for Hansen.
“This is the occupation of humanity”
“The crew of Artemis 2 represents thousands of people working tirelessly to take us to the stars,” said NASA CEO Bill Nelson. “This is their occupation, this is our occupation, this is mankind’s occupation.” The White House said US President Joe Biden congratulated the four astronauts over the phone and thanked them for their work. The German astronaut Alexander Gerst also congratulated on Twitter in English: “Congratulations, my friends. Let’s go!”
The “Artemis 2” mission, which is scheduled to last around ten days, would be the first manned “Artemis” launch after the successful test of the “Artemis 1” mission in December. The unmanned capsule “Orion” had traveled around 1.4 million miles through space, flew around the moon, landed again in the Pacific after around 26 days in space and had collected important data. Previously, the mission had not been under a good star with cost explosions and repeated start postponements for various reasons. The unmanned test mission was considered an important step for the return of humans to the moon, with the long-term goal of a trip to Mars.
For the first time a woman and a non-white person
About a year after “Artemis 2”, another manned flight including moon landing is to follow with “Artemis 3”. The “Artemis” program, named after the Greek goddess of the moon, is intended to land a woman and a non-white person on the moon for the first time. The European Space Agency Esa and space agencies from several other countries are involved in “Artemis”.
The last time people were on the moon was with the “Apollo 17” mission around 50 years ago – the landing took place on December 11, 1972. Overall, the USA was the only country with the “Apollo” missions between 1969 and 1972 to have twelve astronauts the moon.
“The moon is an important target for astronautics,” said Europe’s ex-space chief Jan Wörner of the German Press Agency. However, the “Artemis” program is a clear further development: “Not “Back to the moon”, but “Forward to the moon”: The mission does not have four white, male Americans on board, but is an example of diversity: different skin colors, three “Men and one woman, or three Americans and one Canadian. That’s exactly what Forward to the Moon means: no repetition, something new, a diverse team.”