In a few days, four astronauts could be strapped into a spacecraft for the first crewed trip to head toward the moon since 1972.
“Things are certainly starting to feel real,” said Christina Koch, a NASA astronaut and one of the four members of the Artemis II crew, said during a news conference Sunday morning.
She and her crewmates — Reid Wiseman and Victor Glover of NASA, and Jeremy Hansen of the Canadian Space Agency — spoke from crew quarters at Kennedy Space Center in Florida. In the days leading up to the launch, scheduled for Wednesday, they are living in a precautionary physical quarantine to ensure that they do not fall ill before or during their mission.
The Artemis II mission is to take them on a 10-day mission that is to go to the moon, without landing, and then back to Earth, splashing down in the Pacific Ocean. For NASA, it is a major test of the spacecraft (in particular, the life support systems) in the lead-up to trying to land astronauts on the moon in a couple of years.
It is a mission of deep-space firsts. In the 1960s and 1970s, the astronauts in the Apollo program were white American men. Ms. Koch will be the first woman to pass over the moon, Mr. Glover will be the first Black person and Mr. Hansen will be the first Canadian.
“We always say that we are not doing this for the superlatives,” said Mr. Wiseman, who is the commander of the mission. Rather, Artemis II is “for all, and by all,” he said. “This is what NASA embodies.”
Their towering rocket has been sitting at the launchpad for more than a week after NASA fixed problems that scuttled launch opportunities in February and early March.
Mr. Hansen said they had prepared to make detailed visual observations of colors and brightness and other features when they pass over the far side of the moon, including swaths of the surface that human eyes have never seen before. As he has waited to launch, he sometimes has gone outside at night and looked up at that bright round object in the sky.
“I really feel like, gosh, that is really far away,” Mr. Hansen said. “And it just gives me great appreciation for it.”
Ms. Koch added, “It is our strong hope that this mission is the start of an era where everyone, every person on Earth, can look at the moon and think of it as also a destination.”
Kenneth Chang, a science reporter at The Times, covers NASA and the solar system, and research closer to Earth.
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