Legal Insurrection has been following the developments related to NASA’s Artemis program.
In April, Artemis II astronauts (Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, Christina Koch, and Jeremy Hansen) successfully completed a roughly 10‑day lunar flyby mission and splashed down safely in the Pacific Ocean off San Diego.
Artemis III has just been redefined as a 2027 Earth‑orbit test flight to validate docking and crew transfer with commercial lunar landers, which must be successful before a crewed lunar landing is attempted.
NASA has now officially announced the crew for this 2027 mission, kicking off a year or more of mission-specific training for this team.
NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman introduced the crew members at a press event at the Johnson Space Center in Houston. They are:
- Commander Randy “Komrade” Bresnik
- Pilot Luca Parmitano
- Mission specialist Frank Rubio
- Mission specialist Andre Douglas
Bob Hines was named the backup crew member.Bresnik, 58, is a former Marine fighter pilot and “TOPGUN” graduate who logged 149 days in space during a space shuttle flight in 2009 and a long-duration stay aboard the International Space Station in 2017.Parmitano, 49, an astronaut with the European Space Agency, was the first Italian commander of the space station and an Italian air force test pilot.Douglas, 40, is a test engineer and Coast Guard reserve commander who will be making his first space flight on Artemis III. He served as a backup crew member for the recently completed Artemis II around-the-moon mission.Rubio, 49, is an Army Black Hawk helicopter pilot and a family medicine physician. He spent a U.S. record 371 days in space aboard the ISS in 2022-23.
This is a very exiting development. Hopefully SpaceX and Blue Origin will have the vehicles and equipment ready as scheduled.
Elon Musk’s SpaceX and Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin are racing to deliver the lunar landers. The two-week demo is targeted for 2027. Blue Origin suffered a recent setback when its massive rocket exploded during an engine-firing test on the launch pad in Florida, shaking nearby homes and illuminating the sky with an orange fireball.NASA’s Jeremy Parsons said the setback is a learning opportunity and that the space agency is confident Blue Origin’s rocket will be ready in time.NASA’s Artemis program aims to return astronauts to the moon’s surface for the first time since the 1970s. A recent revamp of the program announced by Isaacman aims to fast-track it similarly to the Apollo era, adding the upcoming spaceflight around Earth before eyeing a lunar landing in 2028.“We are certainly humbled as a crew to be able to be your crew that executes this Artemis III mission in space,” said Bresnik, Artemis III commander.
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