By Staff Writer: Kathryn Richter
With the launch of NASA’s Artemis II mission on April 1st, many people are learning all over again that space travel is not something of the future, and has been happening constantly for decades.
The crew on Orion, the spacecraft assigned to the Artemis II mission, account for only four of the 14 people currently in space.
Of those four, three are American astronauts and one is Canadian. Jeremy Hanson, the Canadian Space Agency astronaut is the only among the crew on his first journey to space. Victor Glover and Reid Wiseman have both been in space for more than 170 days total, and have worked on multiple missions for NASA over their careers.
The fourth person on Orion, Christina Koch; has become the first woman to leave Earth’s lower orbit, the first woman to journey to the moon, and holds the record for single longest space flight by a woman. She continues to break milestones for women in space everyday.
Koch is not the only woman in space however, French astronaut Sophie Adenot and Swedish American astronaut Jessica Meir are also changing space exploration aboard the International Space Station, researching life in microgravity.
The five others currently aboard the ISS include American astronauts Christopher Williams and Jack Hathaway, and Russian cosmonauts Sergey Kud-Sverchkov, Andrey Fedyaey and Sergei Mikayev.
A third spacecraft holds the three remaining people not on Earth. A Chinese mission consisting of taikonauts Zhang Lu, Wu Fei, and Zhang Hongzhang, has the three men on the Tiangong space station, which is the only other space station in Earths orbit.
The Artemis II mission has brought back a sense of wonder to space travel, and more attention to those who are not on ground with us. Hopefully that attention will continue to grow as the world learns more about the space we’re surrounded by.