The NASA-led crew that’s scheduled to fly around the moon next year will hold a news briefing Tuesday at Naval Base San Diego, home of the recovery team that will pluck them from the Pacific when they parachute back to Earth.
Astronauts Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover and Christina Koch, along with Jeremy Hansen from the Canadian Space Agency, have been selected to carry out the first crewed mission to the moon since the crew of Apollo 17 went there in 1972.
During Tuesday’s briefing the Artemis II explorers will display the new test version of the Orion spacecraft that they will live in during a mission that’s expected to last 10 days. The actual flight capsule will parachute into the ocean south of San Diego, where a Navy recovery team will await them.
The Navy has performed such missions many times, including recovering Skylab space station astronauts who splashed down in the Pacific in the 1970s. In December 2022, the San Diego-based amphibious transport dock USS Portland recovered the unmanned Artemis I space capsule.
The Artemis II mission had been scheduled to launch late this year. But NASA recently delayed the flight until at least September 2025 to give the space agency time to deal with technical problems.
