Four astronauts chosen to take part in the NASA Artemis II mission landed in Florida on 27th March, the last stage of preparation for the first crewed trip to the Moon in over 50 years.

NASA astronauts Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover and Christina Koch and the Canadian Space Agency astronaut Jeremy Hansen jumped out of Northrop T-38 jets that they flew in Houston, Texas, to NASA Kennedy Space Centre, where they could soon travel to space in the NASA towering Space Launch System (SLS) rocket on April 1.

They will be in an Orion crew capsule that will be constructed to take human beings to deep space. The space voyage will take about 10 days, and the crew will orbit the moon at high speed.

The mission commander, Wiseman, told reporters upon landing at Kennedy Space, “this is something the nation and the world have long been looking forward to doing again, and that he and his crewmates are simply pumped to go do this.”

“It has been a long way. It has been a wonderful trip, it is wonderful down here in the Florida warm air,” he added.

The Artemis II is a first-of-its-kind, providing the first crewed mission in the multi-billion-dollar Artemis program of NASA. It will not strive to land a spacecraft on the Moon; however, it will launch human astronauts further than any other human spacecraft to date, subjecting the Orion spacecraft to life support, navigation, communications and heat shield tests.

Boeing is the prime contractor of the core stage of the SLS, Northrop Grumman manufactures the solid-fuel boosters of the rocket, and Lockheed Martin manufactures the Spacecraft Orion.

This is the crew that has been in training for the mission since it was named in 2023 and has spent over two years training. They have been used to standard preflight quarantine at NASA’s Johnson Space Centre in Houston since March 18 and are to be transferred into the NASA astronaut crew quarters in Florida before launch.

Glover, a pilot of the mission, would also be the first Black astronaut to fly to the Moon vicinity. Koch will become the first woman to do it, and Hansen will become the first non-American astronaut to leave low Earth orbit.

All the crew members, with the exception of Hansen, are already in space. Wiseman, who commanded the mission last year, informed reporters that the crew were ready to handle any eventualities.

“Once we leave the planet, we may re-enter our planet, we may spend three or four days around the earth, we may go to the moon – that is where we want to go,” Wiseman said. But it is a test mission, and we are prepared to take on any situation.

EXPERIENCED CREW

Wiseman, 50, spent 165 days in the International Space Station on a 2014 mission launched on a Russian Soyuz spacecraft. He was a test pilot in the U.S Navy and became the chief astronaut of NASA, and was then chosen to lead Artemis II.

In 2020, Glover, 49, became the pilot on NASA’s Crew-1 mission, the first operational ISS mission to use SpaceX’s Crew Dragon capsule to spend 168 days in space. He piloted over 40 planes before joining ⁠NASA, having a career in the U.S. Navy, with combat missions and a test-pilot mission.

In 2019, Koch, 47, became the first woman to have a record spaceflight of 328 days in the ISS. She was an electrical engineer and physicist who worked as a NASA engineer before, and conducted prolonged 3 expedition research work in Antarctica.

This will be the first spaceflight mission of Hansen, 50, who was made a Canadian astronaut in 2009. His seat is an indication of a long history of U.S.Canadian cooperation in human spaceflight, such as Canadian input in robotics on the ISS.

As it strives to have a long-term human presence on the Moon and future crewed missions to Mars, NASA has further Artemis missions in the years ahead.