CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. — Four astronauts preparing for NASA’s upcoming lunar mission represent a dramatic departure from the space program’s past.
Unlike the Apollo missions from more than 50 years ago that featured exclusively white male military test pilots, the inaugural Artemis team showcases today’s more inclusive astronaut program with a woman, an African American, and a Canadian crew member.
All four astronauts were born after NASA’s legendary Apollo program concluded, which transported 24 people to the moon with 12 actually walking on its surface. While this mission won’t involve a lunar landing or orbit, the crew will travel farther into space than any Apollo astronauts did, offering extraordinary views of the moon’s far side never seen before.
Here are the four Artemis astronauts preparing to forge the path for upcoming lunar landings:
Commander Reid Wiseman will lead this nearly 10-day expedition. The 50-year-old widower and former Navy captain from Baltimore believes raising his children alone presents a greater challenge than traveling to the moon.
Three years ago, while serving as NASA’s chief astronaut, Wiseman received the invitation to command humanity’s first lunar voyage since 1972. His wife Carroll’s 2020 cancer death made him hesitate about the opportunity.
Following his five-month International Space Station mission in 2014, his teenage daughters showed little enthusiasm for another space journey.
“We talked about it and I said, ‘Look, of all the people on planet Earth right now, there are four people that are in a position to go fly around the moon,’” he explained. “I cannot say no to that opportunity.”
His daughters showed their support the following day with homemade moon cupcakes. The most difficult aspect isn’t departing from them, but rather “it’s the stress that I’m putting on them,” he noted.
Maintaining complete transparency with his daughters, he recently informed them about the location of his will.
Navy Captain Victor Glover views his participation as one of NASA’s few Black astronauts as “a force for good.”
The 49-year-old former combat pilot from Pomona, California, regularly listens to Gil Scott-Heron’s “Whitey on the Moon” and Marvin Gaye’s “Make Me Wanna Holler” from the Apollo era’s time period.
“I listen to those for perspective,” he shared. “It captures what we did well, what we did poorly.”
His opportunity to inspire others represents “an amazing blessing and a privilege.” Despite completing one spaceflight with an early SpaceX mission to the International Space Station, he faces new personal challenges. With four daughters in their late teens and early twenties, “and I spend as an much time and thought preparing them as NASA does preparing me.”
He remains intensely concentrated on executing “our best race so that we can hand the baton off to the next leg” — a 2027 practice docking mission orbiting Earth between an Orion crew capsule and lunar landers. The crucial moon landing would occur in 2028 with different astronauts.
Christina Koch isn’t concerned about a brief lunar journey after spending nearly a year in space during her previous mission.
The 47-year-old electrical engineer from Jacksonville, North Carolina, established the record for the longest single spaceflight by a woman at 328 days. During her extended space station stay in 2019, she participated in the first all-female spacewalk.
Rather than focusing on any individual achievement, “it’s about celebrating the fact that we’ve arrived to this place in history” where women can travel to the moon, she emphasized.
Prior to joining NASA, Koch worked for a year at a South Pole research station. Combined with her space experience, she believes she’s “inoculated” her family and friends to her dangerous assignments.
“So far, I haven’t gotten too many nerves from folks. Maybe my dog, but I’ve reassured her that it’s only 10 days. It’s not going to be as long as last time.”
She and her husband share a rescue dog named Sadie Lou.
Canadian fighter pilot and physicist Jeremy Hansen faces the dual pressure of his first space mission while representing his nation’s inaugural lunar envoy.
“Maybe I’m naive, but I don’t feel a lot of personal pressure.”
The 50-year-old Hansen grew up on a farm near London, Ontario, before relocating to Ingersoll and pursuing aviation. The Canadian Space Agency chose him as an astronaut in 2009, and he joined the Artemis crew in 2023.
He now comprehends the enormous effort required for the Apollo moon missions.
“When I walk out and I look at the moon now, it looks and feels a little bit farther than it used to be,” he observed. “I just understand in the details how much harder it is than I thought it was watching videos of it.”
Potential risks remain — something he’s discussed with his college-aged son and twin daughters. “The most likely outcome is that we will come back safe. There’s a chance we won’t, and you will be able to move through life even if that happens,” he told them.
