This will be the Artemis III mission: four astronauts, three launches, two dockings and one splashdown

NASA this week presented the Artemis III mission, which will test docking the Orion spacecraft with two lunar landers in low Earth orbit, in preparation for taking humanity back to the surface of the Moon.

The crew, which includes a European for the first time on an Artemis mission, will immediately begin training on the Orion spacecraft systems and will also collaborate in the development and operations of test versions of the Blue Origin and SpaceX landers.

The Artemis III mission builds on the successful flight of Artemis II, which was completed in April, and will help NASA prepare to send the first astronauts to Mars.

Artemis III sees the launch in rapid succession of the world’s most powerful rockets. Blue Origin’s pathfinder lander, which can remain in orbit for several weeks, will launch first and wait for the crew.

NASA will use the SLS rocket to send astronauts aboard Orion into orbit around Earth, ahead of a rendezvous in space with the company’s lander test unit, with which Orion will remain docked for about two days to conduct tests and technology demonstrations, including entry into the lander.

After completing operations docked with Blue Origin, Orion will separate and wait for Starship. SpaceX’s Starship exploration module will launch and rendezvous with Orion to spend about a day docked for verifications and testing. After that, Orion and its crew will undock and return home, landing safely in the Pacific Ocean, where a US Navy and NASA team will recover the astronauts.

In total, the crew is expected to remain in space for about two weeks. The exact duration of the mission will be determined in real time based on launch, rendezvous and docking operations.

The crew: Douglas, Parmitano, Bresnik and Rubio

This will be the third space mission for Bresnik, who launched aboard the space shuttle Atlantis on the STS-129 mission to the International Space Station in 2009. He later traveled to the space station on the Soyuz MS-05 spacecraft from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan and served as a flight engineer on Expedition 52 and as commander of the station’s Expedition 53.

A native of California, he graduated from The Citadel with a degree in mathematics and was selected by NASA in the astronaut candidate class of 2004. A retired colonel in the United States Marine Corps, he has accumulated more than 7,000 flight hours in 95 types of aircraft and is a member of the Society of Experimental Test Pilots.

Since 2018, he has served as assistant to the chief of the Astronaut Office for exploration affairs, overseeing the development and testing of the spacecraft and systems that will operate during the Artemis missions.

Artemis III will also be Parmitano’s third space flight. Selected by ESA as an astronaut in 2009, he first served as a flight engineer on the Italian Space Agency’s (ASI) first long-duration mission to the space station, launching in a Soyuz spacecraft from Baikonur in 2013.