A new NASA trailer previews a big moon announcement in movie style.
NASA will join with the Canadian Space Agency (CSA) to announce the four astronauts who will ride around the moon during the Artemis 2 mission. You can watch the big reveal here at Space.com on Monday (April 3) at 11 a.m. EDT (1500 GMT) via a NASA Television feed live from Ellington Field, near NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston.
“Are you ready to meet your crew?” the NASA trailer on YouTube (opens in new tab) states after boldly showing scenes of spacesuited astronauts walking, parade style, and the Space Launch System rocket dramatically lifting off to start the uncrewed Artemis 1 moon-orbiting mission in 2022.
Related: NASA’s Artemis program: Everything you need to know
“It’s a new era of pioneers, star sailors, thinkers and adventurers,” NASA administrator Bill Nelson says at the trailer’s opening. The quote is a callback to words Nelson said on Sept. 12, 2022 (opens in new tab) at Rice University in Houston, on the 60th anniversary of then-president John F. Kennedy giving his famous “we choose to go to the moon” speech at the same location.
In the 1960s, Kennedy was promoting what came to be known as the Apollo program. When Kennedy spoke, NASA had just barely begun the first Earth-orbiting missions and was enaged in a space race with the Soviet Union for scientific and reputational supremacy. That said, even Kennedy was pondering space collaborations with that country before his death.
Today things are much different; Artemis 2 is the leading edge of the NASA-led Artemis Accords, a collaboration of 23 nations (including Canada) working together for peaceful exploration and moon work. Artemis 2 will fly around the moon no sooner than November 2024 on the first crewed visit to lunar realms since Apollo 17 landed on the surface in December 1972.
Canada received its seat aboard Artemis 2 by supplying, via the company MDA, a future Canadarm3 robotic arm that will service NASA’s planned Gateway space station in lunar orbit.
The CSA also confirmed in late March that it would extend its International Space Station participation to 2030, alongside major partners NASA, the European Space Agency and Japan. (Russia has said it plans to exit the partnership sometime after 2024.)
Artemis 3, a planned landing mission at the lunar south pole currently set for 2025, will depend on surface spacesuits from Axiom Space (already partially revealed during a recent event) and the Starship landing system from SpaceX that may be tested in Earth orbit as soon as April.
NASA has pledged Artemis missions will be far more inclusive than those of the Apollo era; Artemis 3, for example, will put the first woman and the first person of color down on the moon, agency officials have said. The CSA astronaut aboard Artemis 2 will be the first non-American to leave Earth orbit.
Elizabeth Howell is the co-author of “Why Am I Taller (opens in new tab)?” (ECW Press, 2022; with Canadian astronaut Dave Williams), a book about space medicine. Follow her on Twitter @howellspace (opens in new tab). Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom (opens in new tab) or Facebook (opens in new tab).
