NASA announced the crew on Tuesday for its Artemis III mission, the next crewed flight in the agency’s Artemis program and a critical step toward returning astronauts to the moon later this decade.The crew consists of Coast Guard Reserve Cmdr. Andre Douglas; Col. Frank Rubio, an Army Black Hawk helicopter pilot and family medicine physician; and Italian space station commander and Air Force Col. Luca Parmitano. The crew will be led by mission commander Randy Bresna, a two-time astronaut, former space station commander, and Marine Corps colonel.“Artemis III is an incredibly exciting, complicated, and highly coordinated multi-launch campaign,” said Jeremy Parsons, acting Assistant Deputy Associate Administrator of NASA. “This mission is deliberately designed to take calculated risks, so that future crews will be safer and ultimately successful when we put boots on the lunar surface.”
The announcement comes just months after Artemis II successfully carried four astronauts around the moon and back to Earth in April, marking humanity’s first crewed journey beyond low-Earth orbit since the Apollo era. Building on that mission, Artemis III is scheduled to launch in 2027 and will test key systems and operations needed before astronauts attempt a lunar landing on Artemis IV in 2028.
