The Orion crew will practice rendezvous with the lander, docking with it, and crew transfer between the vehicles.
NASA has announced the names of the astronauts who will go to low Earth orbit in 2027 as part of the second crewed flight of the Artemis program. For two weeks, they will practice rendezvous and docking with test versions of lunar landers from Blue Origin and SpaceX, as reported on the agency's website.
The launch of Artemis-3 is scheduled for the second half of 2027. Initially, it was planned that the mission would aim to land humans in the lunar south polar region; however, after a recent major restructuring of the program, this task has been assigned to Artemis-4, while Artemis-3 will serve as a stage for testing technological readiness for the return of humans to the lunar surface.
The commander is NASA astronaut Randolph Bresnik, who has flown once on the Atlantis shuttle and was part of the 52nd and 53rd expeditions to the ISS. The pilot of the Orion spacecraft is ESA astronaut Luca Parmitano, who was the commander of the 61st expedition to the ISS. The mission specialists are NASA astronauts Andre Douglas and Frank Rubio. Douglas was part of the backup crew for Artemis-2, which flew to the Moon in the spring of this year, while Rubio unexpectedly spent over a year on the ISS due to an incident with Soyuz MS-22, for which a rescue ship was sent. The backup crew member for Artemis-3 is Robert Hines, who flew to the ISS as part of the 67th and 68th expeditions.
The current flight plan is as follows. The New Glenn launch vehicle will place a test version of the Blue Moon lunar lander from Blue Origin into low Earth orbit. It can wait in orbit for 90 days for the arrival of Orion, which will be launched into space using NASA's SLS launch vehicle. Then, over two days, the Orion crew will practice rendezvous with the lander, docking with it, and crew transfer between the vehicles.
After that, Orion will undock from Blue Moon and wait in orbit for a test version of the Starship lander from SpaceX — this will be the second stage of Starship V3 with an added docking adapter, rather than a full-fledged lunar lander being developed under the HLS project. Thus, the module will not have a pressurized cabin for crew transfer, and the astronauts will only practice rendezvous and docking.
Additionally, they will test the functionality of new spacesuits for extravehicular activities being developed by Axiom Space. The Orion crew will spend about two weeks in space, after which the spacecraft will return to Earth, landing in the Pacific Ocean.
According to the contract with NASA, the Blue Moon module is expected to deliver not only people but also rovers to the Moon. The agency and the company itself hope that the recent explosion of the New Glenn rocket on the launch pad will not lead to delays in the flight schedule.
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