NASA has named three US astronauts and an Italian to serve as the crew for its next Artemis mission, a spacecraft docking demonstration in earth's orbit next year that will test moon landers from Elon Musk's SpaceX and Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin for the first time in space.
NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman at a ceremony in Houston named US astronauts Andre Douglas, Frank Rubio and Randy Bresnik and Italian astronaut Luca Parmitano of the European Space Agency as the crew for Artemis III. It is due to launch late next year, with no specific date announced.
"Artemis III is an incredibly exciting, complicated and highly co-ordinated multi-launch campaign," Jeremy Parsons, NASA's Artemis program manager, said on Tuesday.
"It's going to happen in a short period of time with three of the world's most powerful rockets."
Bresnik, 58, a former test pilot and a veteran of three spaceflights, was named mission commander. The crew also includes a space record-holder, a first-time space traveller and the first European national to join an Artemis mission.
The inclusion of Parmitano, 49, in the Artemis mission marks a win for Italy at a politically sensitive time for NASA's closest international partners.
Parmitano joined the ESA astronaut corps in 2009 and has flown to space twice. He is the first ESA astronaut to join an Artemis mission and the second non-US member after the Canadian Space Agency's Jeremy Hansen flew on Artemis II.
The mission will be a delicate dance in low-earth orbit of multiple spacecraft involved in NASA's complex Artemis program, the flagship US effort to return people to the moon for a long-term presence.
The program faces competitive pressure from China, which is targeting its own 2030 crewed moon landing.
Though the two-week Artemis III mission won't approach the moon, it is seen as a key debut test of the two primary moon landers NASA will use on subsequent Artemis missions to put astronauts on the lunar surface.
SpaceX's Starship and Blue Origin's Blue Moon will take turns docking with NASA's Orion, the astronaut capsule that launches off earth atop NASA's Space Launch System.
The three spacecraft will test docking mechanisms and hover around each other in low-earth orbit before returning to earth.
Three US astronauts and a Canadian astronaut flew around the moon in April on NASA's Artemis II mission, following Artemis I in 2022, a similar flight but without a crew.
The second crewed voyage in NASA's Artemis program, Artemis III is the final mission planned before the space agency attempts to land astronauts on the lunar surface in 2028.
First to launch to orbit in the Artemis III mission sequence will be Blue Moon, followed by the launch of Orion carrying the astronauts, Parsons said. The two spacecraft will dock for about two days while the astronauts conduct tests and technology demos in Blue Moon.
Blue Moon will undock from Orion, making way for Starship, which will then attempt to dock for a day before returning to earth.
