Four Astronauts.
Four Historic Firsts.
The crew of Artemis II didn’t just journey toward the Moon — they redrew the boundary of who exploration belongs to. Meet the people carrying history on their shoulders.
On April 1, 2026, the Space Launch System carried four astronauts toward the Moon for the first time since Apollo 17 in December 1972. But beyond the sheer audacity of the return, this crew carries a deeper significance: among them are the first woman, the first person of color, the first Canadian, and the oldest person ever to travel to the vicinity of the Moon. Each first is a story. Here are all four.
The Commander Who Lost Everything and Kept Going
Reid Wiseman is a man who has learned to hold the extraordinary alongside the devastating. A Navy fighter pilot who flew combat missions in Iraq, a test pilot who worked on the F-35 program, and a two-time spacewalker who spent 165 days aboard the ISS — his résumé reads like a checklist of the most demanding things a human being can choose to do. But the defining chapter of his life came off the clock.
In 2020, his wife Carroll Taylor died of cancer. Wiseman became a single father to two daughters, and kept his assignment to Artemis II. In a CBS interview before launch, he described his daughters’ ambivalence: they’d rather he stayed home. “They would definitely rather I be a stay-at-home dad and hang out,” he said. “But they also know that this is a unique opportunity. The parents have to live their dreams just like the kids have to live their dreams.”
Selected as chief of the astronaut office from 2020 to 2022, Wiseman was the natural choice to command the first crewed Artemis flight. On launch day, he sat in the left seat of Orion, monitoring a fully automated ascent — ready to intervene, likely never needing to. At 50, he became the oldest person to travel to the vicinity of the Moon.
“To the NASA workforce, to our program managers — to bring our entire world together to go explore and get to Mars and beyond — we say a huge thank you.”
— Reid Wiseman, ahead of launchBreaking a Barrier Fifty Years in the Making
Victor Glover has made a career of firsts. In 2020, he became the first Black astronaut to live aboard the ISS for a long-duration assignment, serving as pilot on SpaceX’s historic Crew Dragon Crew-1 mission and spending 168 days in orbit — conducting four spacewalks along the way. He logged over 3,500 flight hours across more than 40 aircraft, 400+ carrier landings, and 24 combat missions in the Navy.
He holds four degrees: a bachelor’s in engineering from Cal Poly San Luis Obispo, and master’s degrees from Air University, the Naval Postgraduate School, and Air University in Alabama. A father of four, Glover described the moment he told his family about his Artemis II assignment through barely-contained emotion: “When I told them, they erupted — let’s go! I’m about to start crying right now. I didn’t even know I needed it.”
On April 1, 2026, the moment Orion cleared Earth orbit, Glover became the first person of African descent to travel toward the Moon. The milestone was not simply symbolic. For a mission that NASA designed to show who the future of exploration belongs to, his seat in the pilot’s chair carried the weight of decades.
“There’s a lot of little things that will divide us. It would be nice if this could just be some caulking, some reinforcement to fill in those spaces, to prevent division.”
— Victor Glover, before launchFrom the Antarctic Ice to the Far Side of the Moon
Christina Koch dreamed of becoming an astronaut as a child in Jacksonville, North Carolina. She built toward it with a methodical, almost poetic progression: degrees in electrical engineering and physics at NC State, work at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, then years in some of the most remote places on Earth — research stations in Antarctica, the Arctic, Greenland, and the South Pacific — preparing herself, perhaps unconsciously, for the isolation and demands of space.
She was selected as a NASA astronaut in 2013, alongside her Artemis II crewmate Victor Glover. Her first mission, a 328-day stay aboard the ISS from March 2019 to February 2020, set the world record for the longest continuous spaceflight by a woman. She conducted six spacewalks totaling 42 hours and 15 minutes, including the first-ever all-female spacewalk with Jessica Meir on October 18, 2019 — a moment that made headlines around the world.
On Artemis II, Koch becomes the first woman in history to leave low Earth orbit, venturing toward the Moon’s far side at altitudes and distances no woman has ever reached. She describes the mission in terms of inheritance and invitation: her hope is that it transforms the Moon from something we look at into a destination that everyone can claim.
“How do we feel as the people that can call the Moon a destination, not just something we’re looking at? It is our strong hope that this mission is the start of an era where everyone can look at the Moon and think of it as also a destination.”
— Christina Koch, CBS News interviewThe Fighter Pilot Who Learned to Fly at 12 — and Ended Up at the Moon
Jeremy Hansen grew up on a farm in Ingersoll, Ontario, and discovered flight at age 12 when he joined the Royal Canadian Air Cadet Squadron. He earned his glider wings at 16, his private pilot’s license at 17, and never stopped climbing. A bachelor’s degree in space science from the Royal Military College, a career as a CF-18 combat pilot and NORAD operator, and selection as a Canadian Space Agency astronaut in 2009 — all of it led to a moment he couldn’t have imagined as that farm kid staring up at Ontario skies.
Artemis II is Hansen’s first spaceflight, which makes his journey all the more remarkable: he goes from never having been to space to circling the Moon on his debut. His place on the crew is the result of a 2020 treaty between the United States and Canada, through which Canada contributed Canadarm3 — the robotic arm planned for NASA’s Gateway lunar station — in exchange for a seat on Artemis. In 2017, Hansen became the first Canadian to lead a NASA astronaut class, and six years later he was named to the Artemis II crew.
As the only non-American and the only member of the crew making his first spaceflight, Hansen carries the ambitions of an entire country — and of every person who has ever looked up at the night sky from somewhere outside the United States and wondered if this, too, could be for them.
“It’s extraordinary as a human being to go to the far side of the Moon and look back and see the Earth from the perspective of the Moon. Whatever that looks like, whatever that feels like — that is an extraordinary opportunity I’m very grateful for.”
— Jeremy Hansen, CBS NewsNot firsts for their own sake — but the future, made visible.
The selection of this particular crew was deliberate, not accidental. NASA had a half century to assemble the people it wanted for the return to the Moon, and it chose a naval commander raised by a wife who refused to let cancer stop her husband’s dreams; a Black Navy pilot who needed his children’s eruption of joy to remind him why it mattered; an electrical engineer who spent years in the polar dark before earning the right to reach for the stars; and a Canadian farm kid who flew his first glider at 16 and never looked down.
Individually, each of their firsts chips away at the implicit message that had defined human spaceflight for decades: that this is something only certain people do. Together — sharing a 10-day journey to the Moon and back — they make that message impossible to sustain. The Moon is no longer just a destination in photographs. On April 1, 2026, it became something larger: proof that where we go next, we go together.
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