HOUSTON – NASA and the Canadian Space Agency (CSA) are set to announce the four astronauts who will blast off aboard an Orion spacecraft on an out-of-this-world mission that will take them on a 10-day journey around the moon.
The announcement will be made at 10 a.m. CDT (11 a.m. EDT) Monday from NASA Johnson Space Center’s Ellington Field in Houston.
Artemis II will be the first crewed mission using the Space Launch System (SLS) rocket, the Orion spacecraft and all the ground systems used to launch them on their historic mission.
NASA says the approximately 10-day mission will test and stress the Orion spacecraft’s life-support systems to prove the capabilities and techniques required to live and work in deep space.
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The crew that will be announced Monday will include three NASA astronauts and one CSA astronaut.
Artemis II is building off the successful test mission of Artemis I, which launched on an uncrewed Orion on top of the SLS rocket in November and took a 1.4-million-mile journey around the moon that tested the systems before astronauts fly on board on missions to the moon.