The crew for NASA’s upcoming Artemis 3 mission, here posing for their official portrait, was announced on Tuesday, June 9, 2026. Left to right: Andre Douglas, Luca Parmitano, Randy Bresnik, Frank Rubio. Credit: NASA/Bill Stafford
When NASA added a low Earth orbit test flight to the Artemis program in February, moving the lunar landings from Artemis 3 to Artemis 4, details became sparse. The agency filled them on Tuesday.
At a press conference, NASA named the four-person crew for Artemis 3, a 2027 Earth-orbit test flight that will attempt to rendezvous and dock with test articles (prototype versions of spacecraft designed for test environments and not for full flight) of both Blue Origin and SpaceX lunar landers. Artemis 3 will be a complex, multiple-launch mission that has never been attempted before. NASA veteran Randy Bresnik will take command. European Space Agency (ESA) astronaut Luca Parmitano will serve as pilot – the first ESA astronaut to be selected for an Artemis mission. NASA astronauts Frank Rubio and Andre Douglas joined the crew as mission specialists, with Bob Hines named the backup.
“This mission will require the most astonishing coordination of heavy-lift rocket launches in history,” NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman said in a NASA press release.
A very different Artemis 3
The mission Bresnik and his crew bears little resemblance to Artemis 3 of three years ago. Originally planned as the first crewed lunar landing since 1972, it was redesigned in February as an orbital systems test, with the landing moved to Artemis 4 in 2028. The logic is similar to the Apollo missions. Just as Apollo 9 was sent into low Earth orbit before Apollo 11 headed to the Moon, NASA wants to test hardware closer to home on Artemis 3 before attempting a landing.
“This mission is intentionally designed to take risks so that future crews will be safer and ultimately successful when we land on the lunar surface,” said Jeremy Parsons, NASA’s acting assistant deputy associate administrator for Moon to Mars. “The complexity of our integrated operations across multiple launches, spacecraft, rendezvous, [and] “The docking is better than Artemis 2 in many ways.”
The mission has three distinct phases. First, a test article of Blue Origin’s Blue Moon lander launches on the company’s heavy-lift New Glenn rocket and parks in orbit, where it can wait for up to 90 days. orion and its crew follow NASA’s Space Launch System (SLS) rocket, meet up with the Blue Origin lander, and spend about two days docked. During that time they will pass through the hatch separating the two vehicles to test the lander and life support systems that need to be verified in space before they can be used on a landing mission. Then orion Spins off from Blue Origin. SpaceX’s test article Starship Human Landing System (HLS) launches, prepares for a second docking, and the two spacecraft spend about a day connected. While describing the mission in detail, NASA officials made no specific mention of whether the crew would cross the hatch and also enter the SpaceX HLS. Finally, the crew prepares for re-entry and splashdown in the Pacific. The entire mission will last for about two weeks.
“Think how many spacecraft – the ones that will eventually carry humans – will be in orbit at the same time,” Isaacman said at the conference. “This sounds to me like the beginning of Earth’s first Starfleet.”
The spacesuit for the Artemis landing mission will be XEMU, co-designed by Axiom Space and Prada, which is built to withstand the extreme conditions of the lunar south pole. While testing continues on the ground, the International Space Station (ISS) and Artemis 3 will serve as initial on-orbit test beds for the suit. “We’re going to fly the spacesuit to the International Space Station to check this out in 2027,” Parsons said, “and we’ll do hardware interface checkout on at least one lander in the spacesuit during Artemis 3.”
who is going
Bresnik is a retired US Marine colonel who will return to space for the third time. He flew to the ISS on a space shuttle atlantis Served as commander of Expedition 53 during the STS-129 mission in 2009, again through Soyuz MS-05 in 2017. Since 2018, he has helped oversee Artemis hardware development from the Astronaut Office.
At the ceremony, he called for the mission’s place in a longer period of exploration. “We, the Artemis 3 crew, are honored to carry this torch forward,” Bresnik said, “to execute our mission, to sharpen that flame and carry it forward…to carry the fire forward, echoing the immortal words of Apollo 11’s Michael Collins.”
Parmitano becomes the first ESA astronaut assigned to the Artemis mission. An Italian Air Force colonel and test pilot, he previously commanded Expedition 61 in 2019, becoming the first Italian to hold the role. ESA Director General Joseph Eschbacher offered a stark reminder of why their selection matters. During a spacewalk outside the ISS in 2013, a leak in the suit’s cooling system caused Parmitano’s helmet to flood with water – a potentially catastrophic situation. He managed to return to safety inside the ISS without losing his temper. “It tells you more about what an astronaut is than any CV,” Aschbacher said at the press conference. “[He] Precise, composed and determined.”
Rubio holds the American record for the longest single-duration space flight: 371 days on station in 2022–2023. A physician and Army aviator selected to serve as an astronaut in 2017, he expressed much gratitude in his remarks Tuesday, and focused much of it on his family. “First of all, thank you to my wife and our four wonderful children,” he said. “Thank you for your adventurous spirit and resilience. You guys have made all this possible.”
For Douglas, Artemis 3 will be his first trip to space. Selected by NASA to serve as an astronaut in 2021, he most recently served as backup and closeout crew for Artemis 2. A Coast Guard officer with a doctorate in systems engineering from George Washington University, he addressed his sons directly from the stage with a message of hope and perseverance: “If you work hard and you think big, you can do anything you want to do.”
Three of the four crewmembers of Artemis 2 – Reed Wiseman, Victor Glover, and Christina Koch – attended the ceremony, and passed an actual metal baton to the new crew, symbolizing the progress of the Artemis program. “You guys know because you work in the office: We’ve been carrying these sticks around for a very long time,” Wiseman joked. “You got control.”
stress on hardware
On May 28, New Glenn exploded during a static fire test at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station. The explosion destroyed the rocket and damaged Blue Origin’s single New Glenn launch pad. John Koulouris, senior vice president of lunar performance at Blue Origin, said the company is making progress on the investigation and pad cleanup, and will begin reconstruction once cleanup is complete as well as continue construction on the second pad on LC-36b. He said the Blue Moon Mark 1 serial number 1 will complete testing and be ready to launch this year, and the Artemis 3 Mark 2 lunar crew module is already in round-the-clock production. “We will measure ourselves not only by our successes, but also by how we react to setbacks,” Kolouris said at the press conference.
Parsons was direct about the New Glen accident. “While we recognize there are questions about how Blue Origin’s recent anomaly affects our plans, setbacks are an opportunity to learn,” he said. “We are confident that New Glenn will be ready for Artemis 3. NASA is leading the way and bringing all of our expertise and capabilities to the table.”
SpaceX’s situation is different but no less complex. Starship’s 12th test flight on May 22 ended in partial failure when the Super Heavy booster failed to fire all of its engines during descent and crashed into the Gulf of Mexico. The FAA classified the incident as an accident and ordered a company-led investigation before Flight 13 could proceed. SpaceX vice president Jessica Jensen, speaking at a Tuesday press conference, said the company is currently building multiple ships and boosters in parallel at Starbase and is actively building three additional launch pads in Florida and Texas. He confirmed that the long-awaited ship-to-ship propellant transfer demonstration – the technology needed to refuel Starships in orbit before any lunar missions – is targeted for this year. “Starship’s V3 design is planned to be the vehicle for propellant transfer, our unmanned missions to the Moon, and the HLS crew lunar landing,” Jensen said.
what comes next
Artemis 3 is an on-ramp to Artemis 4, the first crewed lunar landing since Apollo 17 in December 1972, with a target date of 2028. NASA also revealed a significant change to the flight plan for that mission. SpaceX’s Starship will now dock with Orion in Earth orbit — not near the Moon as originally planned — before using its engines to push both vehicles onto a direct path into low lunar orbit. “This approach improves crew safety by conducting critical docking events in Earth orbit first, like we’re going to practice in Artemis 3,” Jensen said, “and the crew can dock off the lunar surface at almost any time, without having to wait a few days for NRHO.” [near-rectilinear halo orbit]”
Bresnik clearly raised the stakes. “Space flight is hard,” he said. “And that’s why the most important Artemis mission will always be the next Artemis mission.”
brooks mendenhall is a staff writer for Astronomy and is based in Chattanooga, Tennessee.
