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April 3 (UPI) -- NASA officials Monday revealed the four names that will make up a team astronauts from the United States and Canada that will journey around the moon next year as part of the first crewed flight of the Artemis mission. The four include a woman and a person of color, NASA and the Canadian Space Agency confirmed during the joint announcement at the Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas.
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Cpt. G. Reid Wiseman is a U.S. Navy pilot who previously served as Flight Engineer aboard the International Space Station will command the Artemis II mission. Wiseman, from Baltimore, Md., carried out the 165-day mission at the ISS in 2014. He spent nearly 13 hours as lead spacewalker on the mission.
Cpt. Victor J. Glover Jr. will be the mission's other pilot. Glover was first chosen as an astronaut in 2013 and the U.S. Navy aviator recently piloted and served as second-in-command on the Crew-1 SpaceX Crew Dragon, which landed in May, 2021. That marked just the second-ever crewed flight for the space vehicle. Glover, who is from Pomona, Calif., also served as flight engineer on the International Space Station. Glover will become the first person of color to orbit the moon.
Mission Specialist Christina Hammock Koch was also chosen as an astronaut in 2013. The electrical engineer set a record for the longest single spaceflight by a woman, spending a total of 328 days in space. She also took part in the first all-female spacewalks. Koch, from Grand Rapids, Mich., served as ISS flight engineer during three separate expeditions.
The other Artemis II Mission Specialist is the lone Canadian aboard. Royal Canadian Airforce Col. Jeremy Hansen is an F-18 pilot with 20 years of experience flying the fighter jet. He will become the first Canadian to orbit the moon and was also the first person from that country to lead a NASA astronaut class, training astronaut candidates from the United States and Canada.
The astronauts are scheduled to fly by the moon aboard NASA's Orion spacecraft before returning to Earth in the most critical phase of the Artemis mission thus far, which is expected to last about 10 days.
The 2024 launch date gives NASA at least a full year to test the Orion capsule and analyze further data from the Artemis I mission.
The mission will also test the capabilities of both the astronauts and ship, including the craft's life-support systems under extreme conditions as well as the crew's ability to perform technical tasks in deep space.
The announcement of the crew comes four months after the December completion of the Artemis I mission after NASA's unmanned spacecraft spent nearly a month in space while conducting more than 1 million miles of test flights around the Earth's closest neighbor.
NASA's decision to include Hansen, a Canadian astronaut in the Artemis II project came in exchange for Canada providing its Canadarm 3 robotic arm to the Gateway space station. A Canadian astronaut will also take part in a future mission to the Gateway mini-space station.
The ambitious mission seeks to put astronauts back on the moon for the first time in half a century and ultimately pave the way for mankind to reach Mars.
The last time astronauts visited the lunar surface was during the Apollo 17 mission in December 1972. In 2025, the Artemis III mission will land the four astronauts on the moon's surface in what will also be a historic first for women and minorities.
In 2027, NASA will make a second lunar landing as part of Artemis IV. From there, work will begin to build a permanent outpost on the moon that will serve as a blueprint to life on other worlds, and set the stage "to establishing a long-term scientific and human presence on the lunar surface," NASA said.
The project will eventually feature robotic explorers, landers and rovers while scientists work to create a sustainable human environment on the moon.
Altogether, the four Artemis missions carry a price tag of about $16.4 billion, but the total cost of the initiative was projected to reach upwards of $93 million by 2025, according to an audit by government watchdogs.
Back in 2021, NASA Administrator Bill Nelson acknowledged that the program had run behind schedule due to a renewed focus on safety and as President Joe Biden's budget sought $24.8 billion in new funding for NASA, including more than $6 billion for Artemis.
"Space is hard," Nelson said at the time. "As you see the development of various space systems in the past, there have been delays. When you go farther and farther away from the Earth with new technologies, we have seen historically, delays. Will they occur? I can't answer that question.
"I know the goal is 2024. But I think we have to be brutally realistic, that history would tell us, because space development is so hard, that there could be delays to that schedule for the first demonstration flight of landing humans and returning them safely to Earth."
