The United States National Aeronautic and Space Administration (NASA) on Tuesday the four astronauts who will make up the crew of Artemis III.
The four crew members are all men, three of whom are American and one Italian. They commander Randy Bresnik, pilot Luca Parmitano, mission specialist Andre Douglas, and mission specialist Frank Rubio, as well as a backup crew member, Bob Hines, also an American.
NASA officials also shared new details about the Artemis III mission during an event on Tuesday, including the role the Blue Origin lander will play in the lunar mission.
While the agency and Blue Origin officials acknowledged the recent New Glenn rocket explosion that damaged Blue Origin’s launchpad, they expressed optimism about the upcoming mission, which is scheduled to take place in 2027.
“While we recognise there are questions about how Blue Origin’s recent anomaly impacts our plans, setbacks are a learning opportunity,” said acting assistant deputy associate administrator for the Moon to Mars Programme Office at NASA, Jeremy Parsons, during event.
“We are confident that New Glenn will be ready for Artemis III, together with Blue Origin,” Parsons added. Bresnik, a retired US Marine Corps Colonel selected as an astronaut in 2004, will be the commander of the Artemis III mission. He was previously the commander of the International Space Station for Expedition 53 in 2017.
Over the course of his career, he has logged more than 7,000 hours in nearly a hundred types of aircrafts, rotorcrafts, and gliders, as well as 3,600 hours in spacecrafts.
“We are certainly humbled as a crew to be able to be your crew that executes this Artemis III mission in space,” Bresnik said on Tuesday, “being that unifying link between the phenomenal Artemis II mission we just had two months ago and the Artemis IV mission that will follow ours, where we will again be the first to land humans on another celestial body—that celestial body being our neighbor in the sky at night, the moon.”
Parmitano, a European Space Agency (ESA) astronaut, will be the pilot of the Artemis III mission. Parmitano, who was born in Italy, was selected as an ESA astronaut in 2009, according to ESA.
He was a colonel in the Italian Air Force and, over the course of his career, he has accumulated more than 2,000 hours of flying and has operated more than 40 kinds of aircrafts.
