NASA has a backup astronaut ready for the first human mission to the moon in more than 50 years, which won’t take off until 2025 at the earliest.
NASA astronaut Andre Douglas will serve as backup for three U.S. astronauts on the Artemis 2 lunar mission, the agency announced today (July 3). Douglas will support Commander Reid Wiseman, Pilot Victor Glover and Mission Specialist Christina Koch. Canadian Space Agency (CSA) astronaut Jeremy Hansen, who is also a mission specialist on Artemis 2, already has a backer: astronaut Jenni Gibbons, also with CSA.
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“I’ve always been fascinated by new things. I like to develop things,” Douglas told Space.com in March about the Artemis program, which aims to send astronauts to the surface of the moon later this decade for the first time since 1972. “I really believe in pushing yourself, understanding that , what is our true potential: me as an individual, [and] in all of us as a species.”
“This is the ideal place where we’re going to push that boundary,” he said.
Douglas was selected as a NASA astronaut candidate in 2021 and was awarded full astronaut status this March after completing training. Prior to joining the agency, he served in the US Coast Guard in multiple capacities and earned several postdoctoral degrees in engineering fields ranging from naval architecture to systems engineering.
Immediately prior to his astronaut selection, Douglas was a senior scientist at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Lab (APL) and worked on several high-profile space missions. “That was a popular time,” Douglas said.
He was a disturbance management engineer for example on NASA’s Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART). The historic mission was the first to successfully change the orbit of an asteroid moon around a larger space rock after a deliberate collision in 2022.
“I was scripting a software project to help put the spacecraft into a safe mode if something unusual happened,” Douglas said, adding that the mission was “pretty awesome” because it showed that kinetic planetary defenses against dangerous asteroids were potentially feasible .
In addition, Douglas worked on the main instrument for the Martian Moons Exploration (MMX) mission, which is scheduled to fly to the Red Planet in late 2026. The instrument is called MEGANE (Mars-moon Exploration with Gamma Ray and Neutrons) and will support a large The mission’s goal is to learn composition of Phobos and Deimos, two moons of Mars.
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In May, Douglas even tried moonwalk simulations in the field: he spent a week working at a volcanic field in San Francisco near Flagstaff, Arizona, alongside NASA astronaut Kate Rubins to test the updated spacesuits in a moon-like desert area during both day and night. conditions.
“André’s education and extensive operational experience in his various jobs prior to joining NASA are a clear indication of his readiness to support this mission,” Joe Acaba, chief astronaut at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston, said in the agency’s statement about the Artemis 2 backup selection.
“He has excelled in astronaut candidate training and technical tasks,” Acaba added, “and we are confident he will continue to do so as a backup NASA crew member for Artemis 2.”
Artemis 2 draws on the diverse experience of its crew: Glover, Koch and Hansen will be the first black, female and non-American to orbit the moon.
Earlier this year, the launch of the mission was pushed back nine months to September 2025 to allow, among other things, additional testing of the heat shield. Artemis 3 is not expected to land until 2026 at the earliest.
In interviews with Space.com in May, three members of the Artemis 2 crew (Koch was not available) emphasized that development missions must move at a pace of safety and learning, and that meeting schedules is not the goal.
“At the end of the day,” Hansen told Space.com at the time, “I think it’s also important to realize that we’re never going to be able to reduce that risk to zero. Everything we can learn in our test facilities and [in what] science can reach the earth. And in the end, we will still have some unknown risk that we will have to accept.
“But that’s part of space exploration.