NASA has named veteran astronaut and retired Marine Colonel Randy Bresnik, a native of Santa Monica, California, as the commander of the Artemis III mission. The announcement was made Tuesday at the Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas, by NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman.
Artemis III, targeted for 2027, is a high-stakes test flight designed to validate critical docking procedures between NASA's Orion spacecraft and two commercial lunar landers in Earth orbit. This mission is considered one of the most logistically complex in the agency's history, involving three separate rocket launches and multiple spacecraft.
The crew includes Pilot Luca Parmitano of the European Space Agency, mission specialists Andre Douglas and Frank Rubio, and backup crew member Bob Hines. While Artemis III will not land on the lunar surface, it serves as a crucial proving ground ahead of planned moon landings as early as 2028.
The mission follows April's Artemis II, which successfully sent astronauts around the moon for the first time in over 50 years. The primary objective of Artemis III is for the Orion crew to rendezvous and dock with both SpaceX's Starship Human Landing System and Blue Origin's Blue Moon Mark 2 lander in orbit.
Two crew members will enter the Blue Moon lander through its hatch, but will not board the Starship. Both landers have faced development delays, including a grounding of SpaceX's Starship by the Federal Aviation Administration after a test flight issue in May and an explosion of Blue Origin's New Glenn rocket later that month.
NASA officials expressed confidence that both systems will be ready for the 2027 mission. The Artemis program, established during President Donald Trump's first term, aims to return humans to the moon for the first time since the Apollo era ended in 1972, and to use the moon as a stepping stone for future missions to Mars.