U.S. President Donald Trump just met another NASA Artemis crew.
The astronauts of NASA's Artemis III mission visited the Oval Office on Thursday (Oct. 28) and posed for a few photos with the president.
Their visit came nearly six months to the day after that of the Artemis II crew, who stopped by the White House on April 29, 19 days after the end of their historic flight around the moon.
The Artemis III astronauts are NASA's Randy Bresnik (commander), Andre Douglas and Frank Rubio (mission specialists) and the European Space Agency's Luca Parmitano (pilot). All four — plus backup crewmate Bob Hines of NASA, and agency chief Jared Isaacman — made the White House trip.
"It was a great day at the White House with President Trump and the talented crew of Artemis III," Isaacman wrote via X on Thursday.
Artemis III will launch to low Earth orbit in the summer of 2027, if all goes according to plan. The roughly two-week-long mission will aim to dock NASA's Orion capsule with SpaceX's Starship vehicle and/or Blue Origin's Blue Moon.
NASA selected Starship and Blue Moon to be the crewed lunar landers for the Artemis program, so Artemis III will provide valuable practice: On moon-landing missions, astronauts will launch aboard Orion and then meet up with either Starship or Blue Moon, which will carry them to the lunar surface and back up again.
That's slated to happen for the first time on Artemis IV, which NASA plans to launch in 2028.
We don't yet know which private lander(s) will launch on Artemis III; NASA would like to fly both of them, but it's unclear if both will be ready when the time comes.
That uncertainty applies to Artemis IV as well. We'll have to wait a bit before we know which spacecraft will have the honor of putting astronauts down on the moon for the first time since Apollo 17 in 1972.
