First woman and black astronauts chosen by NASA for Artemis II lunar mission

NASA announced on Monday that they have selected the team for the Artemis II lunar mission, including the first woman and the first African American astronaut to be assigned to such a mission. The team comprises Christina Koch, an engineer who already holds the record for the longest continuous spaceflight by a woman, and Victor Glover, a U.S. Navy aviator who was part of the second crewed flight of a SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule. Glover would become the first astronaut of color ever to be sent on a lunar mission.

The team also includes Jeremy Hanson, the first Canadian ever chosen for a flight to the moon, as a mission specialist, and Reid Wiseman, an International Space Station veteran, named as Artemis II mission commander. The four-member crew was introduced at a televised news conference in Houston at the Johnson Space Center, NASA’s mission control base.

Artemis II will mark the debut crewed flight of an Apollo successor program aimed at returning astronauts to the moon’s surface later this decade and ultimately establishing a sustainable outpost there, creating a stepping stone to future human exploration of Mars. As Wiseman noted during the news conference, ‘We’re building on the legacy of Apollo, but we’re doing it in a way that’s never been done before, and that’s by going sustainably to the moon to learn how to live and work on another world.’