On April 1, four people will begin a 10-day trip to the moon and back for the first time in 53 years.
In the 1960s and ’70s, Nasa landed 12 people on the dusty lunar surface.
Since then, humans have only gone about 870 or so miles away from Earth – in only days, we’ll be 250,000 miles from home.
Artemis II is the second phase of the US space agency’s return-to-the-moon mission, with the launch set for this evening or the early hours of tomorrow UK time.
The crew will be but a speck in the sky to us Earthlings for 10 days as they lap around the moon inside the deep-space capsule, Orion.
They’ll get up close to the far side of the moon, also called the dark side, for being the half of our cosmic neighbour we never see.
So, who are these lucky four?
Reid Wiseman
A decorated veteran Navy aviator, Reid Wiseman will be commander of the crew. The Baltimore is a single dad of two, having lost his wife, Carroll Taylor Wiseman, to cancer in 2020.
Wiseman, 50, was selected as a Nasa astronaut in 2009. This won’t be his first time in space – he served as a flight engineer on the floating research base, the International Space Station, in 2014.
According to his Nasa biography, he completed two spacewalks and helped set a station record by completing 82 hours of research in a week.
He thinks about the moon – a lot – and is taking a notebook with him to jot down his thoughts.
He told Space.com last year: ‘When I stand on the surface of Earth now, and I look at the moon at night – and I might see a waxing gibbous, but I know now on the far side that’s a waning crescent – I’m flipping my brain around to all of those things, and just understanding that.
‘Like, I’ve never spent time in my entire life thinking about that. But now it’s all I think about.’
Victor Glover
The Pomona, California, local will be the pilot of the Orion capsule and will become the first Black man to travel around the moon.
Victor Glover, 49, is a former Navy aviator who has been behind the wheel of a spacecraft before, having flown to the ISS for the SpaceX Crew‑1 in 2020.
The dad-of-four has several master’s degrees and plans to take a Bible and some family heirlooms up to the stars with him.
But he said over the weekend that as much as he hopes his lunar trip will inspire young Black children to become astronauts, he hopes ‘one day we don’t have to talk about these firsts’.
Christina Koch
Meet Artemis II’s mission specialist, Christina Koch, who will be the first woman to head to the moon.
Koch, from Jacksonville, North Carolina, was selected to be a spacefarer alongside Glover, having wanting to be an astronaut since she was 12.
In 2019, she set history by taking part in the first all-woman spacewalk at the ISS.
Yes, Koch, 47, has also been to space before. She essentially spent almost an entire year in the cosmos, at 328 days, and carried out 42 hours and 15 minutes’ worth of space walks.
Nasa knew Koch well before becoming an astronaut as she worked as an electrical engineer at the Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland.
‘For me, all these firsts are really not about one individual’s accomplishments but celebrating where we are at,’ she told The New York Times in January.
Jeremy Hansen
Like most of us, Jeremy Hansen often feels small when looking up at the moon.
But in the world of astronauts, he might as well be as big as the moon. He’s a gigantic 6’2″, nearly hitting the upper limit of how tall astronauts can be.
Hansen, 50, will be the first Canadian in space, hailing from a farm on the outskirts of London, Ontario.
He’s Artemis II’s other mission specialist and kicked off his future career in the stars by joining the Royal Canadian Air Cadets at age 12.
The CSA, Canada’s space agency, picked Hansen to be an astronaut in 2009. He’s going to bring four moon pendants he gave to his wife and children to the moon and back.
‘We’re going to have extraordinary things that we will see,’ Hansen told Space.com. ‘[Seeing] Earth from the moon: It’s something amazing.’
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