NASA names Artemis 3 crew for redefined 2027 mission

On June 9, 2026, NASA released the names of the astronauts who will fly Artemis 3, the program’s first crewed mission whose purpose had until now only been sketched out. The mission commander is Randy Bresnik of NASA, the pilot is European Space Agency astronaut Luca Parmitano of Italy, and the mission specialists are Andre Douglas and Frank Rubio, both from NASA. Bob Hines will serve as the backup crew member. The mission is scheduled for 2027 and will run for about two weeks.

Alongside the crew, NASA confirmed that the mission profile itself has changed. The original plan called for Artemis 3 to mark the first human landing on the Moon since the Apollo program. Under the new plan, the crew will not touch down on the lunar surface. Instead, they will remain in low Earth orbit and carry out a series of rendezvous and docking tests with lunar modules built by two American companies. The crew will spend about two days docked with a module from Blue Origin, and then roughly one day with SpaceX’s Starship module.

According to NASA, the goal of these operations is to validate the complex maneuvers that the next mission, Artemis 4, will require. That mission, planned for 2028, is meant to be the first crewed flight to land near the lunar South Pole, a region tied to deposits of water ice in permanently shadowed craters. Docking the Orion capsule with a lunar module in orbit is a step that has not yet been performed with a crew aboard, which casts Artemis 3 as a technical proving ground before the risk is carried forward to a flight toward the Moon.

Who are the Artemis 3 astronauts?

Most of the crew brings substantial flight experience. Frank Rubio is a physician and former military pilot, best known for holding the record for the longest continuous American spaceflight: 371 days aboard the International Space Station across 2022 and 2023. That stay was originally planned to last about six months, but was extended after a coolant problem on a Russian Soyuz capsule, turning it into an unplanned reference point for research on how long-duration weightlessness affects the human body.

Commander Randy Bresnik and pilot Luca Parmitano are also veterans, each with two prior missions and spacewalks behind them. Parmitano, flying as an ESA astronaut, signals that the European agency remains involved in key phases of the program. The only first-time flyer is Andre Douglas, an engineer admitted to NASA’s astronaut corps in a more recent class. According to NASA, the crew has already begun training focused on the rendezvous and docking procedures that this mission introduces into an operational crewed flight plan for the first time.

What the revised plan changes

The decision to defer the landing to a later mission stems in part from the development schedule of the lunar modules, which are being built under contracts with private companies and are still undergoing testing. Rather than wait for a single module to be fully ready for a crewed landing, the agency chose to use Artemis 3 to verify docking with both systems in orbit, where a return to Earth in the event of a fault is faster and simpler than from the Moon.

NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman said Artemis 3 will “demonstrate the power of American innovation and international partnership as we test complex rendezvous and docking operations.” It is worth keeping in mind that this is an announcement and a schedule that depend on how equipment testing unfolds, so the dates remain subject to slippage, as has already happened repeatedly in the history of this program. In your view, will redesigning the mission this way speed up or slow down the return of humans to the lunar surface?