NASA has announced that astronaut Andre Douglas will serve as the backup for the three U.S. astronauts on the Artemis 2 moon mission, which is scheduled to launch no earlier than 2025. Douglas will support commander Reid Wiseman, pilot Victor Glover, and mission specialist Christina Koch. Canadian Space Agency (CSA) astronaut Jeremy Hansen, who is also a mission specialist on Artemis 2, already has a backup astronaut in Jenni Gibbons, also with CSA.
Douglas was selected as an astronaut candidate by NASA in 2021 and graduated to full astronaut status in March this year after completing his training. Prior to joining NASA, he served in the U.S. Coast Guard in various roles and acquired several post-doctoral degrees in technical fields such as naval architecture and systems engineering.
Before his selection as an astronaut, Douglas worked at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Lab (APL) as a senior professional staff member, where he worked on several high-profile space missions, including the Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) and the Martian Moons Exploration (MMX) mission. Douglas played a significant role in the DART mission, serving as a fault management engineer and writing scripts for a software project to help put the spacecraft in a safe mode in case of any anomalies. He also worked on the MEGANE instrument for the MMX mission, which will support a major mission goal of learning the composition of Phobos and Deimos, the two moons of Mars.
In May, Douglas participated in moonwalking simulations in the San Francisco Volcanic Field near Flagstaff, Arizona, alongside NASA astronaut Kate Rubins, to test out updated spacesuits in moon-like desert conditions. NASA’s chief astronaut, Joe Acaba, praised Douglas’s readiness to support the Artemis 2 mission, noting his exceptional performance in astronaut candidate training and technical assignments.
Artemis 2 is expected to be a diverse mission, with Glover, Koch, and Hansen set to become the first Black person, woman, and non-American to go around the moon, respectively. The mission’s liftoff has been pushed back to September 2025 to account for extra testing on the heat shield and other critical items. Artemis 3, a landing effort, is expected to happen no earlier than 2026. The crew members have emphasized that developmental missions must move at the pace of safety and learning, and that meeting schedules is not the objective. They recognize that there will always be some unknown risk associated with space exploration.
