NASA taps US, Italian astronauts for Artemis mission with SpaceX, Blue Origin mooncraft

June 9 (Reuters) – NASA on Tuesday named three U.S. astronauts and an Italian astronaut to serve as the crew for its ​next Artemis mission, a spacecraft docking demonstration in Earth’s orbit next ‌year that will test 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 as the Artemis III crew, which is due to ⁠launch late next year.

“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.”

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 humans 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 other.

Four U.S. astronauts flew around the moon and back earlier this year in NASA’s Artemis II mission, following Artemis I in 2022, a similar flight ⁠but without ​crew. The second crewed voyage in NASA’s Artemis ​program, Artemis III is the final mission planned before the space agency attempts to land astronauts ​on the lunar surface.