Astronaut Christina Koch is traveling farther in space than any woman has before.
Koch is part of NASA’s four-person Artemis II crew that is blasting to outer space on Wednesday night, and she’ll make history when she becomes the first woman to pass over the moon. In galactic terms, she’d be the first woman to go beyond “low Earth orbit,” according to Space.com.
“Things are certainly starting to feel real,” the Michigan native said during a news conference Sunday, according to the New York Times. The mission will take Koch and her crewmates — Reid Wiseman and Victor Glover of NASA and Jeremy Hansen of the Canadian Space Agency — on a 10-day tour around the moon, without landing, before heading back to Earth.
It’s part of NASA’s broader goal to test out the Orion spacecraft’s life support systems for the first time and plan future missions to the moon.
The quartet (Glover will be the first Black man and Hansen will be the first Canadian to do this type of mission) are quarantining at Kennedy Space Center in Florida for the next couple days to ensure they don’t get sick. There are two backup crew members.
Before this, Koch, 47, set a record for the longest single spaceflight by a woman when she spent 328 days in space and participated in the first all-female spacewalk. She said recently that she wants this mission to help people see that they, too, can aspire to visit the moon one day.
“It is our strong hope that this mission is the start of an era where everyone, every person on Earth, can look at the moon and think of it as also a destination,” Koch said.
