The artemis 3 crew will include Randy Bresnik as commander, Luca Parmitano as pilot, and Andre Douglas and Frank Rubio as mission specialists, NASA announced.
Bob Hines will train with the crew as a backup member, the agency said, and the mission will fly atop the Space Launch System from Kennedy Space Center.
NASA said the flight will not land on the moon but will test rendezvous and docking operations with commercially developed lunar landers from SpaceX and Blue Origin.
Agency officials described the mission as a test of highly choreographed operations across hardware interfaces, software, propulsion and life support systems with crew aboard, Jeremy Parsons, NASA’s Artemis program manager, said.
Mission planners expect the flight to last about two weeks, roughly four days longer than Artemis II, and the mission will help refine plans for a moon landing on Artemis IV, which the sources say is slated to carry astronauts to the surface in 2028.
Each crew member brings different experience. Bresnik has flown to the International Space Station twice and served as an ISS commander in 2017, and he was selected as a NASA astronaut in 2004.
Parmitano has also flown twice on the station and commanded an expedition in 2019, completing six spacewalks and earlier serving as a test pilot with the Italian air force, the sources report.
Rubio is a physician with 28 years of Army service who spent 371 days on the space station from 2022 to 2023, setting the American record for longest single spaceflight, according to NASA.
Douglas will make his first spaceflight after serving as a backup for Artemis II and working on space exploration and robotics at Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, the agency said.
Commercial Landers, Safety Work And Program Outlook
The mission will exercise docking with landers developed by SpaceX and Blue Origin, firms that NASA says are racing to provide the human landing capability for future missions.
Blue Origin suffered a major setback when a New Glenn rocket exploded during an engine test, damaging the company’s only operational launch pad, the sources report.
Despite the anomaly, John Couluris, Blue Origin’s senior vice president of lunar permanence, said the company expects to complete the Artemis III vehicle and be ready for launch in 2027, and he said manufacturing is underway.
Parsons and other agency officials framed the flight as deliberately designed to take calculated risks so that future crews will be safer and successful during a lunar landing attempt, the sources say.
NASA also cited recent work on Orion’s redesigned heat shield, saying the new shield has been fully inspected and is ready for installation, the sources report.
The Artemis program aims to build a sustained human presence on the moon, and NASA announced plans to spend 20 billion dollars on a lunar base, the agency said.
