Video: Reid’s “awesome” ride in Soyuz

NASA announced Monday that former U.S. Navy fighter pilots Reid Wiseman and Victor Glover, veteran space station astronaut Christina Koch, and rookie Canadian astronaut Jeremy Hansen will crew the Artemis 2 mission to fly around the far side of the moon as soon as late next year, a test flight that could carry the foursome farther from Earth than any humans in history.

Reid Wiseman, a veteran U.S. Navy test pilot and former chief of NASA’s astronaut corps, will lead the four-person crew assigned to the Artemis 2 mission to carry people to the vicinity of the moon for the first time in more than 50 years. Wiseman says he views the crew’s job as making sure NASA’s Orion spacecraft is ready for more demanding missions later this decade to support moon landings and assembly of a space station called the Gateway in lunar orbit.

A veteran cosmonaut, a German volcanologist and a Navy test pilot-turned-astronaut undocked from the International Space Station and returned to Earth, descending through low clouds to a jarring touchdown on the frigid steppe of Kazakhstan to close out a 165-day stay in orbit.