The United States National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) plans to announce the names of four astronauts for its Artemis 2 mission, scheduled to launch in early next year. This mission will involve a crewed flight around the Moon, marking the first manned mission in lunar orbit since the Apollo program ended over 50 years ago. Officials from the Canadian Space Agency (CSA), which is contributing one astronaut to the crew, will join their American counterparts in the announcement, set to take place at the Johnson Space Center, NASA's mission control in Houston.
Artemis 2 will represent the first crewed flight, but not the first moon landing, as part of a program aimed at returning astronauts to the lunar surface this decade and establishing a sustainable presence there, providing a starting point for human exploration of Mars. The crew will include the first Canadian astronaut for a lunar mission and three Americans selected from a pool of 18 NASA astronauts, consisting of nine women and nine men, who were chosen for the Artemis program in 2020.
The first Artemis mission successfully concluded in December 2022, culminating in the launch of NASA's first next-generation rocket, which is notable for its size and capabilities, and the newly built Orion spacecraft on a 25-day uncrewed test flight. The goal of the Artemis 2 mission, which will last ten days and cover a distance of 2.3 million kilometers, is to demonstrate that all the life-support and other systems of the Orion spacecraft will function as intended with astronauts aboard in deep space.
