TEXAS — The first human journey into deep space since 1972 is quickly approaching. NASA’s Artemis II mission will send a spacecraft with four astronauts around the moon on a 10-day test flight.

Ken Ruffin, president of the National Space Society of North Texas, said he is ready to take flight from Texas to Florida to watch the launch firsthand.

“This is beyond historic, and I cannot wait to be there. Four NASA astronauts, including the first woman and first person of color, travel around the moon and back on a 10-day round trip,” said Ruffin. “The Orion capsule, built by Lockheed Martin, will travel around the earth a few times, go to gradually higher orbits, before eventually going on translunar injection to loop around the moon over the North Pole, and if you think of the moon as a globe, under the South Pole, and then back to the Earth.”

Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, Christina Cook and Jeremy Hanson are the astronauts who will travel by way of the Space Launch System. Cook is the first woman who will make the full journey around the moon, and Glover, who lives in Texas, is the first person of color who will make the 10-day trek. 

According to NASA, Glover is based at the Johnson Space Center in Houston with family members living in North Texas. Another Texan, Becky Lawler from the Dallas Fort-Worth area, is not part of the Artemis II lineup, but she’s one of NASA’s newest astronauts.

“From the beginning of NASA’s crewed space flight, going back to 1960, when the first astronaut candidates were announced, there has always been a Texas connection,” said Ruffin.

Those connections have expanded to include hundreds of companies like Dydymos, Ruffin’s organization that specializes in public outreach regarding space, and SpaceX, as mentioned during a NASA press briefing last year. 

“They’re building up the land there that we intend to use for Artemis III. I think the partnership is there. I’m happy to see private industry stepping in and saying that this is an important thing for the country to do,” said Debbie Korth, the deputy director of the Orion Program at the Johnson Space Center.

Ruffin said Artemis II is just the second site of a much larger program.

“The whole idea is to go step by step for increasingly more complex missions,” he said, adding that those complex Artemis missions include the construction of a moon base for long-term astronaut stays and eventually excursions to Mars and back.

Ruffin later clarified that while space exploration advocates would like to see future settlements established on the moon, Mars and beyond, those efforts are not related to the Artemis program.