NASA names its Artemis III crew for a mission that will rehearse the return to the Moon

NASA has put faces to its next major step back toward the Moon. At an event at the Johnson Space Center in Houston on 9 June, the agency named the four astronauts who will fly the Artemis III mission, a flight designed to rehearse the rendezvous and docking procedures that future lunar landings will depend on.

The crew is commanded by NASA astronaut Randy Bresnik, with European Space Agency astronaut Luca Parmitano of Italy serving as pilot. NASA astronauts Andre Douglas and Frank Rubio round out the team as mission specialists, while Bob Hines will train alongside them as a backup. The inclusion of an ESA astronaut underlines how international the modern Moon programme has become.

Crucially, Artemis III as currently planned is not the mission that puts boots back on the lunar surface. Instead it is a careful dress rehearsal in Earth orbit, testing the hardware and choreography that a crewed landing will require, with the surface itself slated for a later flight.

A rehearsal, not a landing

The crew is expected to launch into Earth orbit as soon as late 2027. The central objective is to test the two commercially developed Human Landing System vehicles that NASA is relying on: Blue Origin's Blue Moon Mark 2 and SpaceX's Starship. The mission will exercise rendezvous and docking between the Orion spacecraft and one or both of those landers.

That sequencing matters. By verifying that Orion and the landers can find each other and link up safely in the relatively forgiving environment of low Earth orbit, NASA hopes to retire enormous risk before attempting the same manoeuvres in lunar orbit. The actual crewed surface landing has shifted into the Artemis IV plan, currently targeted for 2028.

“You do not want to discover a docking problem for the first time while you are a quarter of a million miles from home. Testing the landers in Earth orbit is exactly the kind of conservative engineering this programme needs.”

— a former mission planner

Why two landers

NASA's decision to certify two competing landers, from Blue Origin and SpaceX, reflects hard lessons from past programmes that depended on a single vehicle and a single contractor. Redundancy is expensive but it guards against the kind of schedule collapse that has historically plagued crewed spaceflight.

• Commander: NASA astronaut Randy Bresnik
• Pilot: ESA astronaut Luca Parmitano of Italy
• Mission specialists: NASA astronauts Andre Douglas and Frank Rubio
• Backup crew member: NASA astronaut Bob Hines
• Target launch: as soon as late 2027, into Earth orbit
• Landers under test: Blue Origin's Blue Moon Mark 2 and SpaceX's Starship

Both landers are ambitious in different ways. Starship is enormous and fully reusable but still in flight testing, while Blue Moon Mark 2 represents Blue Origin's most serious crewed-spaceflight commitment to date. Putting them through their paces with astronauts aboard, but close to home, lets NASA judge readiness without staking a lunar landing on unproven hardware.

Competition also matters commercially. By funding two contractors, NASA keeps each company honest on cost and schedule, applying the kind of pressure that a sole-source arrangement tends to dissolve. The approach mirrors the agency's commercial crew programme for ferrying astronauts to the International Space Station, which paired Boeing and SpaceX and ultimately delivered a working system even when one partner stumbled.

Background

The Artemis programme is NASA's flagship effort to return humans to the Moon for the first time since 1972 and ultimately to build a sustained presence there. Artemis I flew an uncrewed Orion around the Moon, and Artemis II is slated to carry a crew on a lunar flyby, making Artemis III a pivotal bridge between demonstration flights and the eventual surface landing.

The programme has not been without controversy. Costs have ballooned and timelines have repeatedly slipped, drawing scrutiny from auditors and lawmakers alike, while critics question whether the architecture of giant rockets and multiple landers is the most efficient path back to the Moon. Naming a crew is partly a way of rebuilding public momentum behind an effort that has at times struggled to convince taxpayers it is on track.

What it means: naming a crew turns an abstract roadmap into something tangible, giving the public a team to follow and the agency a public commitment to a timeline. But the schedule still hinges on hardware that is not yet flight-proven, and the date could slip again if either lander runs into trouble. For now, the message from Houston is that the people are ready even if the rockets are still proving themselves.