NASA announces Artemis III crew; taps U.S. astronauts, Italian for mission with SpaceX, Blue Origin mooncraft

Subscribed with another email? Logout and Login with that one. Account subscription benefits alongside Premium Stories, Editorials, Opinions and more. Unlock these with Subscription The View From India Looking at World Affairs from the Indian perspective. First Day First Show News and reviews from the world of cinema and streaming. Today's Cache Your download of the top 5 technology stories of the day. Science For All The weekly newsletter from science writers takes the jargon out of science and puts the fun in! Data Point Decoding the headlines with facts, figures, and numbers THEdge At the cutting edge of education and careers Health Matters Ramya Kannan writes to you on getting to good health, and staying there Gender Agenda Stories from beyond the binary. The Hindu On Books Books of the week, reviews, excerpts, new titles and features. The Artemis III crew, from left, Andre Douglas, Luca Parmitano, Randy Bresnik and Frank Rubio | Photo Credit: NASA via AP NASA named three U.S. astronauts and an Italian astronaut on Tuesday (June 9, 2026) 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 U.S. 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 yet announced. “Artemis III is an incredibly exciting, complicated and highly coordinated multi-launch campaign,” Jeremy Parsons, NASA’s Artemis program manager, said at the Houston event. “It’s going to happen in a short period of time with three of the world’s most powerful rockets.” Mr. 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 traveler and the first European national to join an Artemis mission. The mission will be a delicate dance in low-Earth orbit of multiple spacecraft involved in NASA’s complex Artemis program, the flagship U.S. 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 will not 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 U.S. astronauts and a Canadian astronaut flew around the moon and back 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. SpaceX and Blue Origin have faced years of delays in the development of their landers. Last year, the companies pitched NASA on sped-up development plans that prompted a reshuffling of the agency’s Artemis program, giving rise to the Artemis III docking mission. The 2027 mission would require both SpaceX’s Starship and a prototype version of Blue Origin’s Blue Moon to be ready for launch at nearly the same time. SpaceX last month test-launched a new version of its Starship rocket with upgrades for moon missions. Blue Origin’s New Glenn rocket exploded on its launchpad in Florida last month as it was preparing to launch a batch of Amazon satellites. The explosion destroyed much of the company’s only launchpad and grounded for at least several months the rocket that Blue Origin aims to use to launch its Blue Moon lander, which is being ground-tested in Houston and Florida. Blue Origin’s moon chief John Couluris said at the event on Tuesday that the company has made “excellent” progress on its investigation into the explosion’s cause. The company’s CEO expects New Glenn to return to the pad by the end of the year. “We are confident that New Glenn will be ready for Artemis III,” NASA’s Parsons said on Tuesday. The inclusion of Mr. Parmitano, 49, in the Artemis mission marks a win for It

NASA announces Artemis III crew; taps U.S. astronauts, Italian for mission with SpaceX, Blue Origin mooncraft

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NASA announces Artemis III crew; taps U.S. astronauts, Italian for mission with SpaceX, Blue Origin mooncraft

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