NASA names crew for Artemis 3 mission to test lunar landers
HOUSTON - NASA has named the astronauts who will fly the next Artemis mission, a test flight in low Earth orbit in which the Orion spacecraft will attempt to dock with prototypes of two lunar landers.
During an event at the Johnson Space Center on June 9, NASA announced the crew selected to fly the Artemis 3 mission in mid-2027.
Commanding the mission will be NASA astronaut Randy Bresnik, a veteran of one of the final space shuttle missions who later spent nearly five months on the International Space Station. The mission's pilot is Luca Parmitano, a European Space Agency astronaut who spent two long-duration missions on the ISS in 2013 and 2019-20.
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The mission specialists are NASA's Frank Rubio, who holds the record for the longest American spaceflight at 371 days in 2022-23, and Andre Douglas, a rookie astronaut who was a backup for Artemis 2. Bob Hines, a NASA astronaut who flew a six-month mission on the ISS in 2022, will be the mission's backup, training with the four prime crew members to be able to replace any of them.
The four will fly what NASA officials have described as one of the most complex crewed missions ever flown, involving a coordinated series of launches along with rendezvous and docking operations.
"This mission is deliberately designed to take calculated risks so that future crews will be safer and ultimately successful when we put boots on the lunar surface," said Jeremy Parsons, who was named Artemis program manager by NASA last month as part of a sweeping reorganization of the agency.
NASA announced in February that Artemis 3, once set to be the first crewed lunar landing attempt, would instead be a test flight involving Orion and lunar landers in Earth orbit, modeled on the Apollo 9 mission. The agency, though, had offered few specifics about the mission until now.
At the crew announcement, Parsons described how Artemis 3, slated to last two weeks, would unfold. First, Blue Origin will launch a prototype of its Blue Moon Mark 2 lander. That spacecraft will be able to spend 90 days in low Earth orbit.
"This gives us flexibility to launch our crew of four on Orion and our powerful Space Launch System," he said. Orion will rendezvous and dock with the Blue Moon lander, spending two days docked together. That will include astronauts entering the lander and testing a version of the Artemis lunar spacesuit Axiom Space is developing.
"This gives our teams key information on systems the lunar lander crew will depend on, in an environment close to home versus four-plus days away around the moon," he said.
After Orion undocks from Blue Moon, it will remain in low Earth orbit and await the launch of a SpaceX Starship lunar lander prototype. Orion and Starship will dock and spend a day together. Orion will then depart and prepare to return home, splashing down in the Pacific Ocean.
The landers that Orion will dock with are prototypes of those that would later be used for lunar missions, although neither would be capable of a landing. The Starship lander, for example, will be a variant of the Starship Version 3 vehicle that made its first test flight May 22.
Steve Creech, NASA Human Landing System program manager, said in an interview that it will be a model taken "off the line" at SpaceX's Starbase production facility with modifications such as a docking port, but without a crew cabin or landing systems.
"We're not going to do an ingress into the crew cabin" on that Starship, he said. "That's a pretty big change that will come later in the progression of Starship." SpaceX is instead working on a crew cabin for ground tests.
The Blue Moon lander, by contrast, will have a crew cabin and life support system, but without a propulsion system. "They're going to build a mass simulator of the Mark 2 lander coming back from the moon to dock with Orion," Creech said.
The crew cabin, which the crew will enter, will also enable tests of Axiom's suit, such as the ability to put on and take off the suit in the lander's cabin.
Both Blue Origin and SpaceX are still required to carry out uncrewed landings of their vehicles on the moon before NASA will use them for crewed landings. "That combination of hardware activities and the Artemis test mission cover the waterfront of key things we want to demonstrate before Artemis 4," he said.
Creech said he believed that both Blue Origin and SpaceX would be ready with their lander prototypes by Artemis 3's projected launch date in 2027.
"We feel like this is doable in 2027 with both of these providers," he said. "There's hardware build and progress that needs to take place, but I think this is a really good mission to burn down a lot of risk and learn about interacting with Orion, and also keep our tempo of flights going."
One concern is the ability of Blue Origin to launch its Blue Moon lander after a New Glenn rocket exploded on the launch pad during a static-fire test May 28. Blue Origin is making "excellent progress" on the investigation and pad cleanup, said John Couluris, senior vice president of lunar permanence at the company, during the crew announcement event.
While Blue Origin has vowed to resume New Glenn flights by the end of the year, many in the industry are skeptical that the rocket can resume flying before mid-2027 given the work needed to rebuild pad infrastructure damaged or destroyed in the explosion.
NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman said in a Fox Business interview June 4 that NASA was looking at "decoupling" the Blue Moon lander from the New Glenn rocket, potentially allowing it to launch on other vehicles.
"We're looking at that option for risk mitigation," Creech said. A major issue, he said, is that Blue Moon Mark 2 is designed to launch on New Glenn and its payload fairing, which is 7 meters in diameter. That is larger than the payload fairings available for other rockets, like SpaceX's Falcon Heavy and United Launch Alliance's Vulcan Centaur.
"We're working very closely with Blue Origin," Isaacman told reporters after the crew announcement event. "We're making available subject matter expertise, everything we can to get them back in the business of launching big rockets again."
He appeared to rule out flying Artemis 3 if only one of the two landers is ready.
"We're not going to launch this mission until we feel like the objectives that are outlined are sufficient to bring down risk for a follow-on landing to the moon itself," he said. "As it stands right now, that's two landers."
"I would say NASA is extremely confident" about the schedule for Artemis 3 as well as the Artemis 4 landing attempt that would follow in 2028, he said. "We're going to return to the moon before the end of 2028."
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