NASA Releases Details About Artemis III

Four people are going to be part of NASA’s official crew for the Artemis III space expedition: Randy Bresnik, Luca Parmitano, Andre Douglas, and Frank Rubio. They will be using the Orion spacecraft to practice docking with private lunar landers in orbit. The expedition will take the astronauts to a place in low Earth orbit, not the Moon, as other NASA plans suggested. The NASA Artemis III spacecraft is probably going to take off in 2027 as the mission serves as a critical safety test before future missions. Astronauts must safely practice transferring between spacecrafts to prepare for future missions that will officially transfer humans to outer space.

Similar to Artemis II, Artemis III will launch the four astronauts aboard NASA’s Orion spacecraft on top of the huge Space Launch System or the SLS rocket. Once Orion is in orbit, it will practice meeting and docking with two special Moon landers, SpaceX’s Starship and Blue Origin’s Blue Moon Mark 2. Orion will dock one lander at a time, with the astronauts practicing traveling from one ship to the other. “In total, we expect the mission to last around two weeks, this mission is deliberately designed to take calculated risks so that future crews will be safer and ultimately successful when we put boots on the lunar surface,” says Jeremy Parsons from NASA’s Moon to Mars Program Office.

Earlier this year, Artemis II made history when it landed back on Earth after orbiting the Moon. It marked a milestone of being the first crewed flight of the Orion spaceship and travelled further from Earth than any people had ever travelled before.

NASA hopes to reach more milestones just like the Artemis II mission with Artemis III.