Nasa has included a woman and a Black man in the crew for a lunar mission for the first time.
Engineer Christina Koch will be mission specialist and US navy aviator Victor Glover will pilot the four-member Artemis II crew that will fly as early as next year.
The mission will be Nasa’s first to the Moon in more than 50 years.
Ms Koch already holds the record for the longest space flight by a woman, with a total of 328 days, and participated in the first all-female spacewalk.
She will be joined by Jeremy Hansen, the first Canadian chosen for a moon flight, named as a second mission specialist, and mission commander Reid Wiseman, an International Space Station veteran.
Ms Koch said: “Am I excited? Absolutely. We are going to carry all of your excitement, your aspirations, your dreams.”
“This is a big day - we have a lot to celebrate and it’s so much more than the four names that have been announced,” Mr Glover said.
Artemis II will be the first crewed flight of the landmark programme aimed at returning astronauts to the Moon’s surface this decade and establishing a sustainable outpost there, creating a stepping stone to human exploration of Mars.
The objective of the Artemis II flight, a 10-day, 1.4 million-mile journey around the Moon and back late next year or early in 2025, is to demonstrate that all of Orion’s life-support apparatus and other systems will operate as designed with astronauts aboard in deep space.
The three Nasa astronauts were chosen from a pool of nine women and nine men who were selected for the programme in 2020.
The kickoff Artemis I mission was successfully completed in December 2022, capping the inaugural launch of Nasa’s powerful next-generation megarocket and its newly built Orion spacecraft on an uncrewed test flight that lasted 25 days.
If Artemis II succeeds, Nasa plans to follow up a few years later with the programe’s first lunar landing of astronauts - one of them a woman - on Artemis III, then continue with additional crewed missions about once a year.
