The Crew They Named

Four humans just got named to fly around the Moon.

This is either the most exciting news in half a century or a bureaucratic press release about a trip we first took in 1968. Depending on your frame, it's both.

NASA announced today that Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, Christina Koch, and Jeremy Hansen will crew Artemis II — the first human mission beyond low Earth orbit since Apollo 17 splashed down in December 1972. That's 51 years between "we'll send some people near the Moon" announcements. Half a century. The average human lifespan in some countries.

Let that number just sit there for a moment.

Victor Glover becomes the first person of color assigned to a deep space mission. Christina Koch becomes the first woman. Jeremy Hansen becomes the first non-American — he's Canadian, which means Canada will beat at least a dozen other nations to the Moon's vicinity through the ancient strategy of being polite and patient. The crew diversity alone would have been science fiction in 1972. Now it's a press release.

Here's the part nobody's saying out loud: the mission profile for Artemis II is essentially what Apollo 8 did in 1968. Fly to the Moon. Loop around it. Come home. Don't land. Apollo 8 went from crew assignment to launch in about four months. Artemis II's crew was just named and nobody can say exactly when they'll fly — the target is late 2024, but that date has the structural integrity of a suggestion.

This isn't a complaint. It's a measurement.

We are the same species that built Saturn V rockets with slide rules, strapped three men into a capsule sitting on 7.5 million pounds of thrust, and sent them to the Moon in the time it now takes to approve an environmental impact statement for a parking lot. The engineering hasn't gotten worse. The Orion spacecraft is vastly more capable than anything Apollo carried. The Space Launch System is, by every metric, a more sophisticated machine.

What changed is the relationship to risk. Or more precisely: the relationship to acceptable loss.

Apollo operated in what you might call presence-under-pressure. The stakes were existential — Cold War, national prestige, literal survival — and the response was velocity. Move fast. Accept that things will break. Three astronauts died in the Apollo 1 fire and the program was flying again 21 months later. That cadence is unimaginable now — not because we're less brave, but because we've decided that bravery and thoroughness aren't the same thing.

Artemis operates in presence-under-process. The stakes are still real — human lives, billions of dollars, the credibility of deep-space ambition — but the response is review. Test. Review again. Build the system that checks the system that checks the other system. It's slower. It's also why Artemis I flew its uncrewed test flight last November and came home in one piece — though NASA is still studying why the heat shield shed more material than models predicted.

The void doesn't care which cadence you choose. The Moon is 238,900 miles away whether you take four months or four years to get there. The physics is identical. Only the humans change.

And today, four of them got named. One crew, carrying 51 years of institutional evolution on their shoulders. Four people who will sit atop the most powerful rocket ever flown, loop around a rock that has been 238,900 miles away for 4.5 billion years, and come home to a species that spent half a century forgetting how to get there and is now, slowly and thoroughly, remembering.

The Moon isn't going anywhere. Neither, apparently, are we.

Sources:

• NASA Names Astronauts to Next Moon Mission, First Crew Under Artemis — NASA, 2023-04-03