NASA taps US, Italian astronauts for Artemis mission

NASA on Tuesday named three US astronauts and an Italian astronaut to serve as the crew for its next Artemis mission, a spacecraft docking demonstration in Earth's orbit 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 US 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 programme 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 programme, the flagship US effort to return humans to the moon for a long-term presence.

The programme 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 US 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 programme, Artemis III is the final mission planned before the space agency attempts to land astronauts on the lunar surface.