Nasa reveals Artemis III astronauts in next step towards moon landing

Nasa named three US astronauts and ⁠an Italian astronaut on Tuesday to serve as the crew for its next Artemis mission, a spacecraft docking demonstration in Earth’s orbit next year that would test moon landers from Elon Musk’s SpaceX and Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin for the first time in space.

Nasa Administrator Jared Isaacman at a ceremony in Houston named US astronauts Andre Douglas, Frank Rubio and Randy Bresnik and Italian astronaut Luca Parmitano of the European Space Agency as the crew for Artemis III. It was expected to launch late next year, with no specific date yet announced.

“Artemis III is an incredibly ‌exciting, complicated and highly coordinated multi-launch campaign,” Jeremy Parsons, Nasa’s Artemis programme manager, said at the Houston event. “It’s going to happen in a short period of time with three of the world’s most powerful rockets.”

Bresnik, 58, a former test pilot and a veteran of three space flights, was named mission commander. The crew also includes a space record-holder, a first-time space traveller and the first European national to join an Artemis mission.

The mission would be a delicate dance in low-Earth orbit of multiple spacecraft involved in Nasa’s complex Artemis programme, the flagship US effort to return people to the moon for a long-term presence. The programme faces competitive pressure from China, which was targeting its own 2030 crewed moon landing.

Though the two-week Artemis III mission would not approach the moon, it was seen as a key debut test of the two primary moon landers Nasa would ⁠use on subsequent Artemis missions to put astronauts on the lunar surface.