The first woman to travel to the moon already has a first and last name. Her full name is Christina Hammock Koch. and she was chosen to participate in Artemis II, the manned mission that represents the return of American astronauts to the Moon after more than half a century of absence.
Aged 44, married and childless, Christina Koch was chosen from a group of 16 women who are among the 40 active members of the astronaut corps of the United States National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA).
Christina Koch will be accompanied by three men during her trip to the moon. All three are soldiers, but two are American – including one black – and all three have to their credit a flight in space and a stay in the international space station (ISS), just like their partner. This is not the case for the fourth member of the crew, an astronaut from the Canadian Space Agency, for whom this is the first jump into the cosmos.
However, neither Koch nor any of his three companions will set foot on the lunar surface. They will have to content themselves with observing it through the screens of their Orion capsule which, propelled into space by the powerful SLS launcher, will pass in front of our natural satellite. A few days later, they will have a second chance to see our natural satellite up close. It will be when Orion circles and describes a trajectory back to our blue planet, stranding in the Pacific Ocean off the coast of San Diego, California, a dozen days after leaving.
The choice of the first woman to go to the Moon and beyond was the subject of a carefully considered and contrasting decision within NASA. A graduate in physics and electrical engineering from North Carolina State University, she joined the Agency’s 21st class of astronauts in 2013, which, made up of four men and four women, completed its period of training. 18 month training in 2015.
She left at 40 and came back at 41
Like the vast majority of astronauts, Christina Koch confirms that “from a very young age, I wanted to be an astronaut, even though I knew that my chances were very, very low”. She managed to get a job as an engineer at the Agency, which she left to try to become an Arctic and Antarctic research assistant, which “turned out to be one of the best experiences ever had,” she confessed.
But Christina Koch’s professional profile is dominated by the fact that she holds the world record for the longest uninterrupted stay of a woman in space.. She lived and endured in the orbital complex for 328 days, 13 hours and 58 minutes, circling the Earth every 90 minutes and traveling at a speed of 28,800 kilometers per hour.
What has been her only space mission so far began in mid-March 2019, when she blasted off from the Baikonur Cosmodrome aboard a Russian Soyuz capsule.. He was 40 at the time. And when Koch landed in the steppes of Kazakhstan aboard another Soyuz capsule on February 6, 2020, he had just celebrated his 41st birthday in space a few days earlier.
His stay of just under 11 months in orbit was aimed at studying the effects of microgravity on the organs, muscles and bones of women.. The objective was to determine how a woman’s body rebalances itself in the face of long periods of weightlessness, radiation and the stress of prolonged confinement and demanding teamwork during space flight. long term.
She also underwent intensive training to carry out repair and maintenance work on the exterior of the ISS.. In October 2019, she participated with her classmate Jessica Meir in the first spacewalk of a pair of female astronauts. During her stay in orbit, she performed six spacewalks, more than any other, totaling 42 hours and 15 minutes of floating in the cosmos, the void below her feet, 400 kilometers above sea level, clinging to the outer handles of the orbital complex.
The four selected for the return
NASA maintains Artemis II launch will take place in November 2024 from Kennedy Space Center in Florida. But it is likely to be delayed until 2025. The crew will be ready and trained for any date the Agency decides, as their specific training is about to begin. The main task of the four crew members is to check, during the flyby of the Moon and on return, that all the electronic and mechanical systems of the Orion spacecraft are working properly.
Artemis II follows the unmanned Artemis I mission, which launched into space on November 16 and landed in Pacific waters on December 11 for a first integrated test of the SLS rocket and Orion capsule.. Artemis II is expected to pave the way for Artemis III, during which another woman, another man of color and two other astronauts – none of whom have yet been chosen – will descend on the Moon and become the first human beings of the third millennium. to leave their footprints there.
As expected, one of the crew members of Artemis II is Canadian. This is Colonel Jeremy Hansen, a Royal Canadian Air Force fighter pilot who, at 47, has never flown in space before.. The Canadian Space Agency is a full member of the ISS, and the White House envisioned Artemis as a cooperative program led by NASA and open to other space agencies. For future missions, astronauts from its three closest allies – Australia, Japan and the United Kingdom – will be front and center.
Both Jeremy Hansen and Christina Hammock Koch travel as specialists, under Gregory Reid Wiseman, 47, an astronaut since 2011, who has accumulated 165 days in orbit, two spacewalks and who was, until a few months ago, at the head of the astronaut corps. A computer engineer, captain in the United States Navy and naval aviator, he flew the F-14 Tomcat, F/A-18F Super Hornet and F-35 Lightning II fighter jets and took part in war actions in various theaters of war. operations.
The pilot of the Orion spacecraft is Victor Jerome Glover, a 46-year-old black man who is also a captain in the United States Navy. From the same class as Koch, he is a test pilot and completed four spacewalks between November 2020 and May 2021 on the ISS, where he arrived on the first mission of SpaceX’s Crew Dragon capsule. of tycoon Elon Musk.
NASA hopes to make history again with a woman engineer and three servicemen. It will be late next year or early 2025, more than 50 years after the Apollo 17 capsule landed in the Pacific with two military aviators -Gene Cernan and Ronald Evans- and a geologist -Harrison Schmitt- , who in December 1972 starred in the last moon mission of the 20th century.