Former Marine Corps Air Station Miramar fighter pilot Randy Bresnik has been named a member of NASA’s Artemis III team, which will perform difficult tests above Earth meant to prepare a later crew to land on the moon.
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Bresnik, 58, will be joined by NASA astronauts Andre Douglas and Frank Rubio and Italian astronaut Luca Parmitano of the European Space Agency on a mission that might occur as early as late 2027, NASA said.
The announcement was made Tuesday, slightly more than two months after the four-member Artemis II astronauts successfully orbited the moon and later splashed down off San Diego, where they were recovered by the San Diego warship USS John P. Murtha.
NASA says that the Artemis III astronauts will climb into an Orion spacecraft in Florida and be carried into low-Earth orbit by a massive Space Launch System rocket.
The astronauts will then test Orion’s ability to rendezvous and dock with test versions of one, or both, of the commercial human landing systems that are being developed by Blue Origin and SpaceX.
The landers will transfer future astronauts from lunar orbit to the moon’s surface, then back to their spaceship.
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No humans have stepped on the moon since Project Apollo in the late 1960s and early 1970s.
Bresnik has been a NASA astronaut for 22 years and is among the agency’s most experienced space travelers. He spent nearly 11 days on the International Space Station during a space shuttle mission in 2009. Bresnik made a second trip to ISS in 2017 and stayed 139 days before returning to Earth.
His military career began in 1989 when he joined the Marine Corps. Three years later, he was designated as a naval aviator. He specialized in flying F/A-18 fighter jets as a pilot and test pilot.
Bresnik was assigned to Miramar for part of the 1990s, a period in which he flew F/A-18s on three deployments to the western Pacific. He also attended Miramar’s famed Naval Fighter Weapons School, known as TOPGUN, before the program was relocated to Nevada.
In late 2002, he returned to Miramar and was sent to Kuwait to fly combat missions during Operation Iraqi Freedom.
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