NASA announces Artemis III crew; taps U.S. astronauts, Italian for mission with SpaceX, Blue Origin mooncraft

Account subscription benefits alongside Premium Stories, Editorials, Opinions and more. Unlock these with Subscription

The View From India Looking at World Affairs from the Indian perspective.

First Day First Show News and reviews from the world of cinema and streaming.

Today's Cache Your download of the top 5 technology stories of the day.

Data Point Decoding the headlines with facts, figures, and numbers

Health Matters Ramya Kannan writes to you on getting to good health, and staying there

The Hindu On Books Books of the week, reviews, excerpts, new titles and features.

The Artemis III crew, from left, Andre Douglas, Luca Parmitano, Randy Bresnik and Frank Rubio | Photo Credit: NASA via AP

NASA named three U.S. astronauts and an Italian astronaut on Tuesday (June 9, 2026) to serve as the crew for its next Artemis mission, a spacecraft docking demonstration in ‌Earth’s orbit next year that will test moon landers from Elon Musk’s SpaceX and Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin for the ​first time in space.

NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman, at a ceremony in Houston, named U.S. astronauts Andre Douglas, Frank Rubio and ⁠Randy Bresnik and Italian astronaut Luca Parmitano of the European Space Agency as the crew for Artemis III. It is due to launch late next year, with no specific date yet announced.

“Artemis III is an incredibly exciting, complicated and highly coordinated multi-launch campaign,” Jeremy Parsons, NASA’s Artemis program manager, said at the Houston event. “It’s going to happen ‌in a short period of time with three of the world’s most powerful rockets.”

Mr. Bresnik, 58, a former test pilot and a veteran of three spaceflights, was named mission commander. The crew also includes a space record-holder, a first-time space traveler and the first ‌European national to join an Artemis mission.

The mission will be a delicate dance in low-Earth orbit of multiple spacecraft involved in NASA’s ‌complex ⁠Artemis program, the flagship U.S. effort to return people to the moon for a long-term presence. The program faces competitive pressure ⁠from China, which is targeting its own 2030 crewed moon landing.

Though the two-week Artemis III mission will not approach the moon, it is seen as a key debut test of the two primary moon landers NASA will use on subsequent Artemis missions to put astronauts on the lunar surface.

SpaceX’s Starship and Blue Origin’s Blue Moon will take turns docking with NASA’s ​Orion, the astronaut capsule that launches off Earth atop NASA’s ‌Space Launch System. The three spacecraft will test docking mechanisms and hover around each o