Artemis 3 commander confident crew will be ready for 2027 mission

HOUSTON — The astronaut named commander of Artemis 3 is confident that his crew will be ready for what NASA has called one of the most complex missions in the agency’s history in just a year.

NASA named veteran astronaut Randy Bresnik as commander of Artemis 3 during a June 9 ceremony at the Johnson Space Center, along with the other three members of the crew: NASA astronauts Andre Douglas and Frank Rubio and ESA astronaut Luca Parmitano.

The four will fly a two-week mission in low Earth orbit on an Orion spacecraft that will include docking with prototypes of Blue Origin’s Blue Moon Mark 2 and SpaceX’s Starship lunar lander, testing those spacecraft before later crewed lunar landing attempts.

NASA has been planning a mid-2027 launch of Artemis 3, which means the four astronauts will have only about one year to train together before flying what NASA called in a social media post before the crew announcement “one of history’s most complex missions.”

In an interview a few hours after the announcement, Bresnik said he believed that his crew would be ready in time. “I’ve been working Orion and everything that goes beyond Earth orbit for eight years, and so I’ve got a lot of Orion experience,” he said, including serving as an astronaut representative to the mission management team on Artemis 2.

Douglas, while a rookie astronaut, has experience from working as a backup astronaut on Artemis 2. “Between the two of us, we’ll be able to get Luca and Frank up to speed pretty quick, and so I fully expect that a year will be sufficient,” he said.

He added that the crew of Apollo 11 was named in January 1969, six months before that historic lunar landing mission. “So if they can do that in six months, we can make one year.”

Bresnik said the Artemis 2 mission provided confidence in the Orion spacecraft and the Space Launch System rocket that launched it. That included the proximity operations, or “prox ops,” demonstration done on Artemis 2, where the Orion spacecraft maneuvered around its upper stage just after separating from it.

“The prox ops demonstration of Artemis 2 showed that this thing flies very, very well,” he said. “It also proved out the modeling that we were using for Artemis 2 to make our simulators work was pretty darn close.”

Artemis 2 also provided insight into how much training is needed. “The training load timewise is going to be much reduced from what they had,” he said.

There will be some new elements to Orion for Artemis 3, including a docking port and systems to assist with docking, but Bresnik did not consider Orion overall the “long pole” for the mission. “It is having the lunar lander variants or test articles up in space for us to do our work. That’s the biggest thing,” he said, something the crew will be closely tracking this summer.

Because of uncertainty about the landers and the specifics of the mission profile, he said the crew will focus its initial training on Orion. “We get to just dive into Orion and just go whole hog on Orion, and get really as up to speed as we can,” he said.

“When there is more fidelity on exactly what altitude and how the rendezvous are going to go, when that gets figured out on the mission profile, then we’ll be able to do that specific training, already having a good bit of Orion training under our belt,” he said.

Bresnik said one of the things he is looking forward to on Artemis 3 is to “complete as many flight testing objectives they can pack in that’ll buy down risk for the next mission,” which would be a crewed lunar landing attempt on Artemis 4.

“Spaceflight is hard and that’s why the most important Artemis mission will always be the next Artemis mission,” he said at the crew announcement event. “Every single mission we do after this will be more challenging and more complex.”

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