Veteran NASA astronaut Tom Jones recaps the historic Artemis I mission after the Orion capsule made a successful return to earth and outlines what this means for the lunar return program. The Artemis II astronauts were named in a historic announcement on Monday. The astronauts include NASA's Victor Glover, Reid Wiseman and Christina Hammock Koch, and the Canadian Space Agency's Jeremy Hansen. All four will venture around the moon no sooner than late 2024. They'll be the first to fly NASA's Orion space capsule and will lift off from Florida's Kennedy Space Center on a Space Launch System rocket.

The United States space agency (NASA) has unveiled the four-member crew for its upcoming mission around the moon, a team that includes the first woman, the first person of colour and the first Canadian assigned to a lunar mission. At a ceremony on Monday in Houston, Texas, NASA announced that Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, Christina Hammock Koch and Jeremy Hansen would crew the Artemis II mission for a 10-day flight, marking the agency's first manned moon voyage in over half a century. "For the first time in more than 50 years, these individuals -- the Artemis II crew -- will be the first humans to fly to the vicinity of the Moon," Vanessa Wyche, director of the Johnson Space Center, said in a statement. The launch, scheduled for 2024, will be only the second in the Artemis programme, a multinational initiative to establish a "long-term presence at the moon". The last time a manned crew approached the moon was in 1972, as part of NASA's Apollo programme. "This mission paves the way for the expansion of human deep space exploration and presents new opportunities for scientific discoveries, commercial, industry and academic partnerships," Wyche said.