Ever have a scary HR meeting on your calendar? That's how the Artemis 3 crew found out their assignments

NASA astronaut and backup crew member for Artemis 3, Bob Hines.

(Image credit: Space.com / Josh Dinner)

HOUSTON — Ever had a mysterious meeting with management show up on your work calendar? Unannounced and unprompted? With invitees from parts of the company you don't normally sit in on meetings with?That kind of calendar event might send spikes of panic down the spines of some recipients, but it's not always the dreaded meeting with HR you may fear. In this case at NASA, the unsuspecting attendees were not handed their pink slips and shown the door. Quite the opposite. They were gathered to learn the crew assignments for Artemis 3, the agency's next mission progressing its efforts to return astronauts to the moon. Turns out, the five astronauts sitting in the room that day were to become the primary and backup crew for Artemis 3."Historically, I think most of us have been told in the past individually," Artemis 3 backup crew member NASA astronaut Bob Hines told Space.com. "There was some fake meeting name that showed up on a calendar, and we all ended up in a room together," he said.NASA announced the Artemis 3 crew to the public during a reveal ceremony at the Johnson Space Center (JSC) on June 9. It includes NASA astronaut Randy Bresnik as mission commander, Italian astronaut Luca Parmitano from the European Space Agency as pilot, NASA's Frank Rubio and Andre Douglas as mission specialists, and Hines as backup.The quartet will lift off aboard an Orion spacecraft on NASA's Space Launch System (SLS) rocket, and spend about two weeks in low Earth orbit. There, Orion will rendezvous and dock with two different lunar lander designs to test the vehicles' compatibility in space. It's the follow-on mission to NASA's Artemis 2, which flew Orion and a crew of four on a 10-day mission around the moon in April, and the precursor to the Artemis program's first planned lunar landing mission, Artemis 4.Near the end of Artemis 2, NASA associate administrator Amit Kshatriya told reporters the Artemis 3 crew announcement would come "soon" — and now that the picks have been revealed to the public, we're also gaining a little more insight into how the astronauts found out the news themselves.Sitting together around a table in a room at JSC about two weeks before the public announcement, not knowing why they had been called in, NASA's chief astronaut Scott Tingle told the group: "'Look around. This is your Artemis 3 crew,'" Hines said. "That was a really, really cool way to find out.""We know that there's a cast of thousands that make it happen," he said. "There are a lot of astronauts that are qualified and capable of doing it, and it is an incredible responsibility that not just the astronaut office or NASA, but that the country bestows upon us."