The American Reid Wiseman will command the space mission Artemis II. NASA announced this on Monday. It will be the first manned launch of the Space Launch System (SLS) giant rocket. A ten-day journey is planned, during which the earth will first be circled twice and then the moon once.
If everything goes according to plan, Wiseman will climb aboard the Orion space capsule with three colleagues in November 2024. The odds aren’t bad after NASA’s Artemis-1 unmanned lunar mission worked out “extraordinarily well.” Assisting Wiseman are Pilot Victor Glover, Mission Specialist Christina Hammock Koch and Mission Specialist Jeremy Hansen. Except for Hansen, all of them have already been in space.
Wiseman
G. Reid Wiseman is 47, comes from Maryland and was a flight engineer on board the International Space Station ISS for 165 days in 2014. The systems engineer undertook almost 13 hours of field work. Before his NASA career, the man was a fighter pilot in the Kriegsmarine and then a test pilot there.
Wiseman describes the Artemis II mission as “a tiny step from humans to Mars and a permanent human presence on the moon.” Technically, the journey is intended to demonstrate, among other things, the suitability of the life support systems in the Orion capsule.
Glovers
The vita of Victor Glover, 46, reads amazingly similar. He comes from California, is a systems engineer and also has a master’s degree in flight test engineering and warfare. As a fighter pilot in the marines, he served in the second Iraq war, later becoming a test pilot in the Navy. In 2013 he moved to NASA, where he worked 169 days as a flight engineer on board the ISS in 2020/21. He completed four field missions.
Koch
Christina Hammock Koch is said to be the first woman to see it up close: the American born in Grand Rapids, Michigan, holds the record for the longest time a woman has spent in space, having spent 328 days at a time as a flight engineer board of the ISS. The electrical engineer initially worked at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, where she developed scientific instruments for NASA missions.
She then transferred to the US Antarctic program and spent a full year at the South Pole as a firefighter and part of the search and rescue team. After further aerospace equipment development at Johns Hopkins University, she again followed the lure of ice in Antarctica and Greenland, as well as working for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) in Alaska and, less coldly, Samoa. In 2013, she was finally selected for NASA’s astronaut program.
Hansen
Fourth in the group is 47-year-old Canadian Jeremy Hansen from London, Ontario. Already at the age of twelve he kicks you Royal Canadian Air Cadet Squadron and becomes a private pilot at 17. At the age of 18, he hired himself out to the Canadian military, which was training him to become a fighter pilot. 15 years later, in 2009, the studied physicist is selected for the Canadian space program. In 2011 he worked as a radio announcer for communication with the ISS, in 2013 he joined the CAVES program of the European Space Agency ESA and lived six days underground in Italy, the following year a week on the seabed off Key Largo. Since 2017, Hansen has been NASA’s first Canadian astronaut instructor.
(ds)
