NASA and CSA (Canadian Space Agency) will announce four astronauts who will travel around the moon during an event at Ellington Field at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston. Traveling aboard NASA’s Orion spacecraft during Artemis II, the mission is the agency’s first crewed test flight to establish a long-term scientific and human presence on the lunar surface. The event will take place on Monday, April 3 at 11:00 AM ET (10:00 AM CDT).

Artemis II will be the first team to test the Space Launch System rocket and the Orion spacecraft around the Moon. On their first flight aboard NASA’s Orion spacecraft, astronauts will travel more of the solar system than humanity has traveled before. Their mission will be to verify that all systems of the spacecraft, together with the crew, are operating as planned in the real environment of deep space.

Artemis II is the first crewed mission in NASA’s core human deep space capabilities: the Space Launch System rocket, the Orion spacecraft, and the ground systems needed to launch them. The approximately 10-day mission will test and load the Orion spacecraft’s life support systems to demonstrate the capabilities and techniques needed to live and work in deep space in a way that only humans can.

The crew will include three NASA astronauts and one CSA astronaut, demonstrating the agency’s commitment to international partnerships in the Artemis program. Artemis II builds on the successful flight test of Artemis I, which launched an uncrewed Orion on an SLS rocket on a 1.4 million-mile journey beyond the Moon to test the systems before astronauts fly to the systems for a lunar mission.