NASA’s Victor Glover Set To Become The First Black Astronaut To Travel Around The Moon – AfroTech
NASA’s multi-billion-dollar Artemis II mission is in full swing.
Artemis II will send humans to travel around the moon for the first time since the Apollo 17 mission in December 1972, according to The New York Times. The astronauts on board the spacecraft are Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, Christina Koch, and Jeremy Hansen.
On April 1, the astronauts were launched into space at 6:35 p.m. ET from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, FL, according to NBC News.
“Artemis II will pave the way for future Moon landings, as well as the next giant leap — astronauts on Mars,” NASA said in a statement shared on X.
Liftoff.
The Artemis II mission launched from @NASAKennedy at 6:35 pm ET (2235 UTC), propelling four astronauts on a journey around the Moon.
Artemis II will pave the way for future Moon landings, as well as the next giant leap — astronauts on Mars. pic.twitter.com/ENQA4RTqAc
— NASA (@NASA) April 1, 2026
Piloting the aircraft is Glover, a Southern California native who has completed four spacewalks and has flown more than 40 aircrafts during his time in the U.S. Navy before NASA, Reuters reports. Glover was the first Black man to embark on an International Space Station mission in 2020 and will become the first Black individual to travel to the moon when Artemis II is completed, the Los Angeles Times reports.
History will also be made by others on the crew. Koch is set to become the first woman to journey around the moon, while Hansen will become the first Canadian — and the first non-U.S. citizen — to do so, according to Reuters.
Additionally, the astronauts are also projected to travel 252,000 miles from Earth, which would be a record, per CBS News.
“This can be an example that people can lean on to see that excellence comes in all shapes, sizes, forms, backgrounds [and] educational experiences,” Glover told Space.com. “We all see so much division. We hope that what we’re doing is a source of — I know, it sounds so cliché — unity. We’re not doing it just for that purpose, right? We’re not just trying to start some unity movement. It really takes us all, in all of our skills, to successfully go to the moon and come back. But in order to do that, we have to take all of our frictions we have as a crew. We work them out, or sometimes we give each other space and we just take a moment. But we have to take these humans — that’s who we’ve got — and we have to work it out.”
Six days after launch, the astronauts are projected to fly past the moon. The mission is expected to last about 10 days, during which they will collect data to support future exploration, CBC reported.
The historic landing will occur in the Pacific Ocean, per NBC.
