SoCal native one of 4 astronauts selected for NASA’s next space mission
Almost 30 years after he graduated from Ontario High School in Southern California, Victor Glover will become one of only a select few astronauts — and the first person of color — to embark on a NASA mission to the moon.
Glover was selected to pilot NASA’s history-making Artemis II mission, expected to take off next year to circle the moon before returning to Earth in 10 days, according to a news release from NASA.
The crew will have three other astronauts, including the first woman and the first Canadian to go on a lunar mission — Christina Hammock Koch and Jeremy Hansen, who will serve as mission specialists — and Reid Wiseman, who will command the mission. Hansen is with the Canadian Space Agency, which has partnered with NASA on the mission.
“We have a lot to celebrate, and it’s so much more than the four names that have been announced; we need to celebrate this moment in human history,” Glover said Monday at a livestreamed NASA event announcing the crew for the mission. “It is the next step on the journey that gets humanity to Mars.”
The Artemis II mission builds off the success of Artemis I, which was an unmanned deep space rocket and spacecraft. The four astronauts will circle the moon, traveling 600,000 miles round-trip at 30 times the speed of sound, according to NASA.
The space agency is aiming to send four astronauts around the moon on the next flight, in 2024, and land humans on the lunar surface as early as 2025.
“Four names, four explorers … answering the call to once more rocket away from Earth and chart a course around the moon,” said Joe Acaba, chief astronaut at NASA.
The mission is not supposed to land on the moon, but it would be the closest that humans have gotten to the lunar landscape in more than 50 years. It’s part of NASA’s mission to establish a “long-term presence at the moon” as well as a pathway to Mars.
“The largest, most powerful rocket in the world is going to propel them onward and upward,” Bill Nelson, NASA administrator, said at the event Monday. “Artemis II will carry the hopes of millions of people around the world. ... We will show what is possible when we dare to reach distant cosmic shores.”
Glover was born in Pomona and graduated from Ontario High in 1994. He earned his bachelor’s degree in 1999 from California Polytechnic State University, according to his biography. He has lived around the nation and the world as a naval aviator, and he became a trained astronaut in 2015.
Artemis II will be Glover’s second spaceflight. He previously served as the pilot on NASA’s SpaceX Crew-1, which landed in May 2021 after 168 days in space.
Glover is married with four children.
“This mission paves the way for the expansion of human deep space exploration and presents new opportunities for scientific discoveries, commercial, industry and academic partnerships and the Artemis Generation,” said Vanessa Wyche, director of NASA’s Mission Control Center in Houston.
Artemis II is expected to launch from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida before splashing down in the Pacific Ocean off San Diego 10 days later.
The lunar exploration program, named after Apollo’s mythological twin sister, hopes to land humans on the moon as early as 2025.
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