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.
Christina Koch, 44, married and childless, was chosen from a group of 16 women who are part of the 40 active members of the astronaut corps of the U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA).
Christina Koch will be accompanied by three men on her trip to the moon. All three are military, but two are American - 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 companion. This is not the case for the fourth crew member, an astronaut from the Canadian Space Agency, whose first leap into the cosmos is taking place.
She left at 40 and returned at 41.
Like the vast majority of astronauts, Christina Koch confirms that "from an early age, I wanted to be an astronaut, even though I knew 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 I've 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 by a woman in space. It 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 so far been its only space mission began in mid-March 2019 when it lifted off from the Baikonur Cosmodrome aboard a Russian Soyuz capsule. He was 40 years old 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.
Her stay of just under 11 months in orbit aimed to study the effects of microgravity on women's organs, muscles, and bones. The goal 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 long-duration spaceflight.
It also underwent intensive training to perform repair and maintenance work on the exterior of the ISS. In October 2019, she and her classmate Jessica Meir participated in the first spacewalk by a couple of female astronauts. During its stay in orbit, it performed six spacewalks, more than any other, totaling 42 hours and 15 minutes of floating in the cosmos, the vacuum beneath its feet, at an altitude of 400 kilometers, clinging to the outer handles of the orbital complex.
However, neither Koch nor any of his three companions 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 will bypass and describe a trajectory back to our blue planet, stranding in the Pacific Ocean off San Diego, California, a dozen days after its departure.
The choice of the first woman to go to the Moon and beyond was the subject of a well-considered and contrasting decision within NASA. A graduate of North Carolina State University with degrees in physics and electrical engineering, she joined the Agency's 21st class of astronauts in 2013, which completed its 18-month training period in 2015.
The four selected for the return
NASA maintains that the launch of Artemis II will take place in November 2024 from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. But it is likely to be delayed until 2025. The crew will be ready and trained for any date decided by the Agency, as their specific training is about to begin. The main task of the four crew members is to verify, during the flyby of the Moon and on the return, that all the electronic and mechanical systems of the Orion spacecraft are working properly.
Artemis II follows the unmanned Artemis I mission, which flew into space on November 16 and landed in Pacific waters on December 11 for the first integrated test of the SLS rocket and Orion capsule. Artemis II is expected to pave the way for Artemis III, in 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. He is Colonel Jeremy Hansen, a fighter pilot in the Royal Canadian Air Force who, at 47, has never flown 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 at the forefront.
Jeremy Hansen and Christina Hammock Koch are both traveling as specialists, under the orders of 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, U.S. Navy captain, and naval aviator, he flew the F-14 Tomcat, F/A-18F Super Hornet, and F-35 Lightning II fighter jets and participated in war actions in various theaters of operations.
The pilot of the Orion spacecraft is Victor Jerome Glover, a 46-year-old black man who is also a captain in the U.S. Navy. Coming from the same class as Koch, he is a test pilot and has performed four spacewalks between November 2020 and May 2021 on the ISS, where he arrived during the first mission of SpaceX's Crew Dragon capsule of tycoon Elon Musk.
NASA hopes to make history again with a female engineer and three military personnel. It will be at the end of next year or early 2025, more than 50 years after the landing in the Pacific of the Apollo 17 capsule with two military aviators -Gene Cernan and Ronald Evans- and a geologist -Harrison Schmitt-, who in December 1972 was the star of the last mission to the Moon of the twentieth century.