WASHINGTON: The four astronauts selected for the Artemis 2 Moon mission will be the first to travel there in more than five decades.<\/p>\n
In doing so, they will become the new faces of American space exploration.<\/p>\n
Americans Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover and Christina Koch will make the voyage with their Canadian colleague Jeremy Hansen, and are now preparing to take off as soon as Apr 1.<\/p>\n
The journey, set to last around 10 days, will take the astronauts on a loop around the Moon, though they will not land on its surface.<\/p>\n
The crew comprises the first woman, the first person of colour, and the first non-American to take part in such a journey.<\/p>\n
Those are key differences from the Apollo era, which included the first and to this day the only humans to travel to the Moon.<\/p>\n
Here is a closer look at the crew:<\/p>\n
REID WISEMAN<\/p>\n
At 50 years old, Reid Wiseman is the mission’s commander.<\/p>\n
The native of Baltimore joined NASA in 2009 following a 27-year career in the US Navy.<\/p>\n
“I never thought I’d be an astronaut,” he said on a NASA podcast. “I mean, come on, it’s like an unobtainable dream.”<\/p>\n
Until it’s not: in 2014, Wiseman traveled to space for a 165-day mission aboard the International Space Station, and later served as NASA’s chief of the astronaut office.<\/p>\n
After losing his wife to cancer in 2020, he raised his two daughters – now teenagers – on his own.<\/p>\n
In January, he said he aimed for transparency in explaining to them the inherent risks of his career and his coming journey.<\/p>\n
“I told them, ‘here’s where the will is, here’s where the trust documents are,'” he said. “And if anything happens to me, here’s what’s going to happen to you.”<\/p>\n
“And that’s just that is a part of this life.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"WASHINGTON: The four astronauts selected for the Artemis 2 Moon mission will be the first to travel there…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":559252,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[23],"tags":[58778,49,48,6294,66,306],"class_list":["post-559251","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-space","tag-astronaut","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-moon","tag-science","tag-space"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/559251","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=559251"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/559251\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/559252"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=559251"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=559251"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=559251"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}