NASA has officially announced the crew of the Artemis 3 mission, with Italian astronaut Luca Parmitano becoming the first European to fly on an Artemis mission. The announcement was made on Tuesday in Houston, where the 49-year-old was introduced alongside three NASA astronauts. "Thank you, grazie," Parmitano said at the announcement, expressing his gratitude in both English and Italian.
The Artemis 3 crew consists of four astronauts, with Parmitano being the only representative of the European Space Agency (ESA). The three remaining crew members are all from NASA. Veteran astronaut Randy Bresnik, 58, has been named mission commander. Joining him are Andre Douglas and Frank Rubio. German ESA astronauts Matthias Maurer and Alexander Gerst were reportedly under consideration for the mission but were ultimately not selected.
Back in November 2025, ESA Director General Josef Aschbacher had explicitly stated that the first Europeans on a NASA lunar mission would include astronauts of German, French, and Italian nationality, with a German going first. Germany even pledged a record €5.4 billion to ESA at the time, a roughly 30 percent increase on its previous contribution.
German Federal Research Minister Dorothee Bär had celebrated the announcement in Bremen, calling it a historic moment.
Originally announced as a lunar mission, Artemis 3 has been revised. Rather than landing on the Moon, the crew will conduct a test flight in low Earth orbit, where they will practice docking maneuvers involving two lunar landers. The mission is currently scheduled for late 2027. NASA's first crewed Moon landing since the Apollo era is now targeted for no earlier than 2028.
The primary goals of the trip include testing the abilities of NASA's Orion spacecraft, as well as a rendezvous with lunar landers developed by the private space companies SpaceX and Blue Origin.
In April of this year, the four astronauts of the preceding Artemis 2 mission successfully flew around the Moon. During that mission, they traveled more than 406,000 kilometers from Earth the farthest any human has ever ventured into space.
Luca Parmitano is a highly experienced astronaut who has completed two missions to the International Space Station (ISS) and served as its commander on one occasion. He became widely known in 2013 following a dramatic incident during a spacewalk, when a technical malfunction caused water to fill his helmet, nearly drowning him in the vacuum of space.
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