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)

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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.”