NASA Selecting New Astronauts, Gearing Up for Artemis II

NASA Selecting New Astronauts, Gearing Up for Artemis II

By Marcia Smith | Posted: August 20, 2025 11:05 pm ET | Last Updated: August 21, 2025 3:36 pm ET

In four weeks, NASA will introduce a new class of astronauts as it begins gearing up for the launch of Artemis II, the first time humans will travel around the Moon since the Apollo era.  NASA hasn’t announced the date other than saying it will be no later than April 2026, but will start building the excitement with three briefings in conjunction with the astronaut candidate ceremony.

NASA is closer than it has been in five decades to returning astronauts to the vicinity of the Moon, if not to the surface. Artemis II is a test flight that will not attempt even to orbit the Moon, much less land. The four-person American-Canadian crew will fly a free-return trajectory taking them past the Moon and back to Earth even if the propulsion system doesn’t perform as planned. The next mission, Artemis III, in mid-2027 is the one that will land.

Crew of Artemis II, L-R: Victor Glover (NASA), Reid Wiseman (NASA), Jeremy Hansen (Canadian Space Agency), Christina Koch (NASA). Credit: NASA

On September 22, NASA will introduce the new astronaut candidates, who will spend two years in training before becoming flight-eligible. The next day, NASA officials will provide an overview of the Artemis II mission and the science and technology experiments that will be aboard. The crew itself will give a briefing on September 24.

NASA is one of many government agencies going through a tumultuous phase as the Trump Administration slashes funding and staff. More than 20 percent of NASA workers have already left or agreed to do so voluntarily through buy-outs. More departures are expected as the agency strives to meet an Office of Management of Budget (OMB) target to reduce the workforce from 17,391 to 11,853 by the beginning of FY2026 on October 1.  The President’s budget request calls for drastic cuts to NASA’s science, technology and aeronautics programs and while the House and Senate appropriations committees don’t agree, it’s far from clear what will happen when FY2026 arrives a few weeks from now.

The Artemis program and human exploration of the Moon and Mars broadly is the one segment of NASA that has strong support from both political parties, the White House, and Congress. Getting American astronauts back on the Moon before China puts taikonauts there is a unifying motivation. China is planning to do that by 2030.

Acting NASA Administrator Sean Duffy was confirmed as Secretary of Transportation and only put in charge of NASA six weeks ago on an interim basis, but he is clearly all-in on the goal of sending astronauts to the Moon and Mars.

He left no room for doubt about what he sees as NASA’s priority — human exploration — telling Fox Business News’ Maria Bartiromo on August 14 that “all the climate science, and all of the other priorities the last administration had at NASA — we’ve going to move aside and all of the science that we do is going to be directed towards exploration, which is the mission of NASA. That’s why we have NASA, is to explore, not to do all these earth sciences.”


Duffy was at Florida’s Kennedy Space Center for the launch of Crew-11 three weeks ago and spoke with them on Monday from Mission Control at Johnson Space Center in Texas. JSC is home to the astronaut corps.

Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) and Rep. Brian Babin (R-TX), who respectively chair the Senate and House committees that oversee NASA, joined Duffy at JSC.  Cruz led the effort to add $10 billion for NASA in the reconciliation bill. He and Babin wrote to Duffy on August 5 asking for details on when and how it will be spent. Cruz posted a video of the JSC visit and wrote that he is “making sure we have the tools we need to maintain American dominance in space,” but provided no details about the fate of the $10 billion.

America has been trying to return humans to the Moon as a steppingstone to Mars for decades. Previous attempts by the George H.W. Bush, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama Administrations all fell victim to budget realities and changing priorities. Obama actually wanted to skip the Moon and go directly to Mars.

Artemis began during the first Trump Administration and the decision by President Biden to stay the course was critical to where Artemis is today. In 2019, Trump set the goal of landing astronauts on the Moon by 2024 so it would happen during what he expected to be a consecutive second term. Delays in the development of the Space Launch System (SLS) rocket and Orion spacecraft, including a two-year analysis of why Orion’s heat shield suffered unexpected char loss during the uncrewed Artemis I test flight in 2022, have pushed both Artemis II and Artemis III into Trump’s second term after all.

Widespread political support may help Artemis persevere and finally put American boots back on the Moon for the first time since the Apollo 17 crew left in 1972. First, Artemis II has to go as planned. Then it’ll be time for Artemis III.

Artemis III requires a lander, however.  In April 2021, NASA selected SpaceX’s Starship Human Landing System (HLS) for that mission, which was planned for 2024 at the time.  As so often happens with development programs, Starship is taking much longer than expected. On Sunday, SpaceX is scheduled to launch Starship on its 10th Integrated Flight Test (IFT). It has yet to reach orbit. All the test flights so far have been suborbital and the last three failed.


SpaceX’s philosophy is “fail fast, learn faster” and remains undeterred, but the clock is ticking for Artemis III. The company still has many milestones to meet including on-orbit refueling and an uncrewed lunar test. Many are skeptical that Starship can be ready to safely land astronauts on the Moon and return them to lunar orbit two years from now.

Duffy is optimistic. He told CBS News’ Major Garrett on August 18 that he thinks mid-2027 for Artemis III is realistic. “I think it’s important to be honest. If I thought we were going to have concerns I would tell you. And if there’s a point that I do have concerns I’ll make that public. But, no, I think we’re on track, where we sit today, to keep the 2027 mission in play.”

SpaceX founder and CEO Elon Musk’s long-standing goal is putting people on Mars, not the Moon. His focus these days seems to be sending a Starship to Mars next year carrying an Optimus robot as a first step. Sunday’s Starship IFT-10 test flight will be an important indicator of whether Starship will be ready to launch Optimus to Mars in 2026 or NASA astronauts to the lunar surface in 2027.

What happens with Artemis after Artemis III is up in the air. NASA laid out an architecture for routine flights beyond that, including assembling a lunar Gateway space station to serve as a transfer point for astronauts between Earth and the lunar surface. But the Trump Administration wants to kill not only Gateway, but SLS and Orion after Artemis III and replace them with commercial alternatives. Congress disagrees, pointing out commercial alternatives don’t exist yet. The reconciliation act — officially the One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBBA) — includes more than $4 billion to continue SLS and Orion for use with Artemis IV and V and $2.6 billion to build Gateway.

Duffy hasn’t shared what he thinks the post-Artemis III future should look like. He wants a nuclear reactor on the Moon by 2030, but has not said when American astronauts — presumably some of those who will be chosen next month — might arrive to use it.

The NASA astronaut corps currently has 41 members following the August 6 retirement of Barry “Butch” Wilmore, half of the “Butch and Suni” team that ended up staying on the ISS months longer than planned when their Boeing Starliner Crew Flight Test spacecraft was deemed insufficiently safe to return them to Earth.

NASA didn’t say how many new astronauts will be selected. By the time they finish training in 2028, the International Space Station will be nearing its end, so their assignments will be for commercial space stations NASA hopes will replace the ISS, the Moon, or Mars.

Sending humans to Mars was fully endorsed by Trump in his inaugural address with Musk standing close by. OMB included $1 billion for Mars-focused programs in NASA’s FY2026 budget request. Although the Trump-Musk relationship cooled, Mars still seems to be a gleam in the eye of the Trump Administration as it is for Musk himself. Whether he might go ahead with private astronauts willing to take more risks than the government would permit for its own employees will be interesting to watch.

 

This article has been updated.

Last Updated: Aug 21, 2025 3:36 pm ET

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