NASA’s Artemis II mission, the first to send humans around the moon in half a century, is slated to launch Wednesday. It will be piloted by one of Southern California’s own.

Victor Glover — a former Ontario High School wrestler and Navy test pilot who often wears his excitement on his royal-blue jumpsuit sleeve — will be the first Black person to reach the moon. The mission is a lunar flyby, so the crew will not land on the moon or enter lunar orbit.

Glover, 49, became the first Black person to serve on an International Space Station expedition in 2020.

“That cannot be right,” Livingston Holder, a former manned spaceflight engineer with the Air Force and space shuttle payload specialist, recalled thinking when he first heard that fact. “How can we go two decades without flying a Black astronaut on a full mission to the station? How can that possibly be?”

Yet, it’s true: Several trailblazing Black astronauts stayed aboard for several days while helping build the ISS on space shuttle missions. None had lived aboard for months on end as an expedition crew member afterward.

For Glover, the achievement — and title of “first” — stirred complicated feelings. In the flurries of media interviews that come with life as an astronaut, he acknowledged the deep responsibility he felt toward the next generations of Black astronauts he hoped to inspire. At the same time, he often reframed his role into NASA’s greater mission and pointed to the many Black trailblazers, such as Holder, before him.

“He’d probably been the first Black person to do X, Y or Z,” said Holder, whose planned mission to space was ultimately canceled after the Challenger disaster in 1986. And since Glover, a team player, was not the first person to serve on an ISS expedition or reach the moon, but instead the first Black person to do so, “I don’t think he really wanted to emphasize ‘I’m the first,’” Holder added.

Glover wasn’t really supposed to be the first Black person to serve on an ISS expedition, either. In 2018, Jeanette Epps was scheduled to join a Russian Soyuz mission to the ISS, which would have given her the title, but five months before the mission, NASA suddenly benched her without explanation.

And while he was aboard the ISS, many Black Americans — including Glover — were forced to grapple with more Earthly challenges. Just months before launch, a white police officer murdered George Floyd in the streets of Minneapolis.

It’s a familiar tension in Black America: The Apollo program began during the peak of the civil rights movement. Many criticized the program as a distraction from the country’s problems and a waste of money that the government could instead use to better the lives of everyday Americans.

During the training for his moon mission, Glover listened to the poem “Whitey on the Moon” by the late Black poet and jazz musician Gil Scott-Heron — which articulates those arguments painfully and pointedly — every week on his morning commute to ground himself in his work.

Glover undergoes spacesuit checks inside the crew quarters suit-up room in the Neil A. Armstrong Operations and Checkout Building as part of the Artemis II Countdown Demonstration Test at the agency’s Kennedy Space Center on Dec. 20, 2025.

(NASA/Glenn Benson)

Advertisement

For Glover, space exploration is an opportunity to lift all Americans and invest in technology that creates hope for a better future.

“Every time you are the first — the first person in your family to go to college, the first person from your school to get a PhD … it’s important for all the people that start where you started,” Holder said. Now they can say, “‘Oh, it is possible.’”

For Black parents in Pomona and beyond who see the next generation of NASA astronauts in their cute, nerdy children, Glover’s example is deeply meaningful.

Glover, born in 1976 in Pomona, was an adrenaline junkie who dreamed of being everything from a stuntman to a race car driver. His parents, a police officer and a bookkeeper, encouraged his curiosity. The young astronaut-to-be also looked up to his grandfather, who enlisted in the Air Force during the Korean War, but was told he couldn’t fly because of his race.

When a young Glover watched a space shuttle launch on television, he immediately wanted to drive the thing.

His first attempt to leave Earth was through sports — pole vaulting, to be specific. Throughout his time at Ontario High and Cal Poly in San Luis Obispo, Glover also added football into the mix and ultimately became best known for his wrestling prowess (despite feeling quite intimidated by his college teammate at the time, Chuck Liddell, who ultimately became an MMA star).

Gregg Givens, an English teacher at Ontario who coached football at the time, remembered Glover as a very nice, very smart kid. “He was marching to his own drummer,” Givens said. “I know that’s a cliche way to say things, but … he was going to do what Victor was going to do.”

After getting a bachelor’s degree in engineering, Glover enlisted in the Navy in 1998. Over his 15 years in the military, he accumulated 3,500 flying hours in more than 40 aircraft, a few master’s degrees along the way, and served in 24 combat missions.

One of his commanding officers bestowed on him a call sign that’s stuck through his NASA days: “Ike,” meaning “I know everything.” (It’s a sensibility his four daughters surely appreciated when Glover, a family man at his core, checks in from space to help them with their homework.)

Like many others before him — including Neil Armstrong, the first person to walk on the moon — Glover cut his teeth as a test pilot out in the Mojave. He attended test pilot school at Edwards Air Force Base, the site of many daring Armstrong flights and space shuttle landings, then served with the Navy’s Dust Devil test pilot squadron in China Lake, Calif.

In 2013, while Glover was in Washington, D.C., on assignment as a Navy legislative fellow, he happened to miss a phone call from NASA. After frantically calling back, he got the news: He was one of eight selected out of a pool of more than 6,000 for the space agency’s 21st class of astronauts.

On Artemis II, he won’t be the only “first” on the capsule: NASA astronaut Christina Koch is set to be the first woman to reach the moon, and Jeremy Hansen, an astronaut with the Canadian Space Agency, is set to be the first non-American to do so.

Holder, whom Glover has pointed to as a mentor, is happy to live vicariously through Glover’s generation of Black astronauts.

On a recent trip to Australia, Holder, now a co-founder of the spaceflight startup Radian Aerospace, stopped by one of the many stations that will help the astronauts communicate with Earth to send Glover a message ahead of launch:

“Through you, we all go to the moon.”

NASA is set to send four astronauts — three from the United States and one from Canada — on a trip around the moon and back without landing there. This is the first time that anyone would travel this far from Earth since Apollo 17 in 1972.

If Artemis II succeeds, missions that return astronauts to the moon’s surface could follow later in the decade.

Here’s what to know about the mission, and the astronauts making the trip.

This is NASA’s big new rocket — the present-day equivalent of the Saturn V used during the Apollo moon landings. It is 322 feet tall and weighs 5.75 million pounds when filled with propellant. Launching from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida, it is capable of sending about 60,000 pounds of payload to the moon.

The design is a remix of technologies developed in the 1970s for the space shuttles.

NASA led the design of the Space Launch System rocket and the Orion capsule, and it hired the commercial companies SpaceX and Blue Origin to provide the lunar landers for future Artemis missions.

Four astronauts were selected for the mission in 2023 and have been training for their journey since then. The three NASA astronauts — the commander Reid Wiseman, the pilot Victor Glover and a mission specialist, Christina Koch — have been to the International Space Station. Mr. Glover is set to be the first Black man to travel around the moon, and Ms. Koch the first woman. A mission specialist from Canada, Jeremy Hansen, has not yet been to space. Mr. Hansen will be the first person who is not a NASA astronaut to make the trip.

Orion is the spacecraft that will carry the astronauts to the moon and back. The top part — the crew module — will return to Earth, splashing down in the Pacific Ocean, off the coast of San Diego.

After Neil Armstrong stepped on the moon, many felt that the space race with the Soviet Union was won and that new lunar missions were not worth the expense. In the decades since, NASA has focused on low-Earth orbit exploration with the space shuttles and the International Space Station.

During the first Trump administration, going back to the moon became a priority for NASA and the program continued under President Joseph R. Biden Jr. The Artemis missions aim to explore the moon for scientific discovery and mine it for resources like frozen water for later space missions, and helium-3 for future fusion power plants.

Artemis I: The first mission of the Artemis program, launched in November 2022, sent an uncrewed Orion capsule into orbit around the moon. Along the way, the mission deployed several small satellites known as CubeSats. Orion returned to Earth 26 days later.

Artemis II: This year’s mission aims to test the life-support and other critical systems on Orion. After separating from the upper stage of the rocket, the crew plans to test Orion’s ability to execute docking maneuvers for future flights. If any serious problems arise while Orion is still in Earth orbit, mission managers will bring the astronauts home.

Once the spacecraft heads to the moon, it will be on what is known as a “free return” trajectory — the moon’s gravity will swing the capsule directly back to Earth without the need for any firing of the engines. That means the Orion capsule could return to Earth even if there were a failure of the propulsion system.

As the Orion flies by the moon’s far side, the astronauts will make observations of the lunar surface, including parts that have never been seen by human eyes. (The Apollo missions were timed so that the near side of the moon, where the astronauts landed, was in daylight, so the far side then was largely in darkness.)

When the moon is between the spacecraft and Earth, communications with the astronauts will be interrupted for 30 to 50 minutes.

Future Artemis missions: In February, NASA upended its plans for what happens after Artemis II. Artemis III was supposed to be the keystone event, landing astronauts near the south pole of the moon by the end of 2028. Instead, it is now rescheduled to launch in mid-2027, and remain in Earth orbit as a test flight for practicing rendezvousing with one or both of the lunar landers that are under development by SpaceX and Blue Origin. And if it goes well, it could set up two landing attempts, Artemis IV and Artemis V, in 2028. That would meet President Trump’s goal of sending NASA astronauts back to the moon before the end of his second term.

Over the last two decades, NASA has spent more than $50 billion developing and building the Space Launch System, the Orion capsule and the accompanying ground systems needed to launch them. There is no simple price tag for just Artemis II, although a report by the NASA inspector general in 2021 said each launch of the Space Launch System and Orion capsule costs about $4.1 billion.