Two of the four astronauts named to the Artemis III mission have ties to Southern California. Randy Bresnik, of Santa Monica, and Frank Rubio, who was born in Los Angeles, will be part of the crew tasked with heading back to space next year for a crucial lunar lander test.
Artemis III Mission Details
Bresnik, who was born in Kentucky but considers Santa Monica his hometown, is the mission commander. Rubio, who was born in LA and now lives in Florida, will be a mission specialist. They will join NASA astronaut Andre Douglas and Luca Parmitano, of the European Space Agency, on the launch into Earth orbit.
Bresnik will be making his third mission to space, including a flight aboard space shuttle Atlantis on the mission to the International Space Station in 2009. Bresnik graduated from The Citadel, a prestigious military college in South Carolina, with a degree in mathematics. He was chosen by NASA in the 2004 astronaut candidate class. The retired U.S. Marine colonel has logged more than 7,000 hours in 95 types of aircraft.
Artemis III will be Rubio’s second spaceflight. He was on the Soyuz MS-22 spacecraft that launched to the space station and broke the record for the longest single-duration spaceflight by an American astronaut with 371 days in orbit. He was part of NASA’s 2017 astronaut candidate class. Rubio graduated from the U.S. Military Academy in 1998.
The mission will test at least one of two commercially developed lunar landers designed to carry astronauts to the moon’s surface in 2028. Elon Musk’s SpaceX and Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin are building the landers that will part of the Artemis III tests.
The Artemis III mission is expected to last about two weeks, about four days longer than the Artemis II mission around the moon earlier this year. The flight is expected to be the final test mission for the Artemis program, providing critical information by testing crew capsule rendezvous and docking operations with the lunar lander or landers.
If successful, NASA plans to land a team on the moon with the Artemis IV mission. Artemis III will be critical because the moon-landing plan requires a lander to meet with the Orion spacecraft, which transported the Artemis II crew, which included Pomona’s Victor Glover, in April.
Original reporting: NBC4 Los Angeles — read the source article.
