WASHINGTON: The four astronauts selected for Nasa’s Artemis II mission were due to arrive in Florida on Friday, entering the final phase of preparations for the first crewed journey toward the Moon in more than five decades.
Nasa astronauts Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover and Christina Koch, along with Canadian astronaut Jeremy Hansen, are set to launch from Kennedy Space Centre as soon as April 1 aboard Nasa’s towering Space Launch System (SLS) rocket, riding inside an Orion crew capsule built to carry humans into deep space. The roughly 10-day mission will send the crew on a high-speed loop around the Moon and back.
Boeing is the prime contractor for the SLS core stage, Northrop Grumman builds the rocket’s solid-fuel boosters, and Lockheed Martin produces the Orion spacecraft.
Artemis II will be the first crewed mission of Nasa’s multi-billion-dollar Artemis programme. While it will not attempt a moon landing, it will send astronauts farther from Earth than any previous human spaceflight, testing the Orion spacecraft’s life-support systems, navigation, communications and heat shield performance. The crew has spent more than two years training for the mission since being named in 2023.
