NASA has announced the four-person crew for its Artemis III mission, scheduled for late 2027, with Italian astronaut Luca Parmitano becoming the first European Space Agency (ESA) astronaut to join an Artemis crew. Parmitano, 49, a native of Sicily who trained as a fighter and test pilot for the Italian air force before being selected as an ESA astronaut in 2009, will serve as pilot of the mission. He is a seasoned spacefarer with more than 300 days in orbit across two previous missions to the International Space Station, and in 2019 became the first Italian to command the ISS. Joining him are NASA astronauts Randy Bresnik as mission commander and Frank Rubio and Andre Douglas as mission specialists. Bob Heintz will serve as a backup crew member capable of filling any role.

The announcement, made at a press conference at NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston, came weeks after the Artemis II mission — the first crewed flight to loop around the Moon since 1972 — returned safely to Earth. However, Artemis III will not follow that trajectory. Rather than landing near the Moon's south pole, as originally planned, the mission will remain in low Earth orbit, where the crew aboard the Orion spacecraft will practise docking with prototype lunar landers built separately by SpaceX, the company led by Elon Musk, and Blue Origin, the firm founded by Jeff Bezos. NASA administrator Jared Isaacman described the mission as requiring