HOUSTON — Early Monday morning, a bunch of small feet took a bunch of small steps to see one giant leap.
“This is so cool,” said 11-year-old Davila Elementary student Evelyn Razate.
Razate and dozens of her classmates were on hand to watch one of NASA’s biggest announcements in decades.
“Ladies and gentlemen,” NASA administrator Bill Nelson told a large crowd at Ellington Field in Houston. “Your Artemis II crew.”
NASA has waited five decades to return to the moon, and on Monday morning the agency introduced the crew that is going.
American astronauts Christina Koch, Victor Glover and Reid Wiseman, along with Canadian astronaut Jeremy Hansen, are scheduled to visit the moon on the Artemis II mission no earlier than November 2024.
The crew will not land on the moon. It will fly within 6,000 miles of the moon’s surface and return to Earth in order to prove the Orion capsule can make the journey safely.
Koch, the first woman to visit the moon, and Glover, the first person of color to do so, will be part of the most diverse crew to ever venture beyond Earth’s orbit.
During the Apollo program, which ended with Apollo 17 in December 1972, only 24 men, all white men, traveled to the moon.
NASA said Monday was monumental for the elementary students who were lucky enough to attend and many others watching from home because it showed them that they can reach for the stars, too.
“Every kid growing up in America should be able to look at the NASA astronauts and see themselves projected in the future,” Wiseman said.
“They are going to be the ones that go to Mars,” said Johnson Space Center director Vanessa Wyche.
Once NASA establishes a permanent lunar presence, it will eventually send the first humans to Mars, which, as Wyche indicated, could very well be one of the students in Monday’s crowd.
Or not.
“No,” fifth grader Nathan Claudio said, without hesitation. “I already promised myself years ago that I would never go to space. I’m terrified.”
The Artemis II crew said that’s OK. Their mission isn’t about making future astronauts, just futures.
“They don’t have to be astronauts, they don’t even have to work in the space industry,” Wiseman said. “But it will spark them. It will spark their imagination. It will turn them into dreamers.”
In order to get to Mars, Wiseman, his fellow crewmembers and many others must first go back to the moon.
By doing so, they will have sent a message to future generations loud and clear.
“Yeah,” said 9-year-old Christian Fontenot. “I know it’s possible.”
“I feel very excited,” Razate said. “I’m very proud to be a girl.”
Clearly, Artemis isn’t just going to the moon. It’s going further.
“To the moon, to Mars and beyond,” Nelson said.