Expanding the Crew

April 20, 2026

When the Artemis II crew arrived at Kennedy Space Center before launch, they introduced the fifth member of the mission: a small plush Moon wearing Earth as a baseball cap, designed by eight-year-old Lucas Ye. Inspired by the Earthrise photograph taken during Apollo 8, Lucas named his design Rise. Inside the plush, on a tiny SD card, were 5.6 million names submitted by people who wanted some part of themselves to make the journey, too.

It was a fitting beginning. Because what made Artemis II historic wasn’t only where it went, though the four astronauts traveled farther from Earth than any human beings before them. What made it historic was who went.

The last time humans traveled to the Moon was December 1972. Every astronaut who had ever made that journey — each person who had seen Earth from lunar distance — was white, male, and American. On April 1, 2026, that changed. Victor Glover became the first Black astronaut to fly to the Moon. Christina Koch became the first woman. Jeremy Hansen became the first person from outside the United States. The crew that carried humanity back to the Moon looked, for the first time, something like humanity itself. 

This matters beyond symbolism. Who is trusted with the mission — whose perspective is considered essential, whose presence is treated as belonging — reflects what a society believes about who counts. For decades, the answer to who explores deep space was narrow, not because of ability, but because of barriers built by discrimination and exclusion. Glover, Koch, and Hansen didn’t arrive on the crew by accident. They arrived because people before them fought to open doors that had been closed: in classrooms, in military flight programs, in the astronaut corps itself, and in the international agreements that made a Canadian seat on an American spacecraft possible. Each of those fights is a human rights story. And each of those stories was, until recently, one NASA was willing to tell. 

When the crew was announced in 2023, NASA celebrated the milestones openly: the first woman, the first person of color assigned to a lunar mission. By the time of the launch, that language had been removed from the agency’s website and public communications, following an executive order directing federal agencies to dismantle diversity programs. The firsts still happened. The crew still flew. But the institution stopped saying it out loud. Whose stories get told and whose get erased matters. It is never a neutral choice. It is one of the ways dignity is either honored or withheld. 

But the public saw what the government would not name. In a season when the news has felt relentless and heavy, millions of people stopped what they were doing and watched. It was the first lunar mission many of us had ever witnessed, and the first broadcast in high-definition video. The crew witnessed a total solar eclipse from behind the Moon, a sight no human eyes had ever seen. And when they looked back at Earth — blue, green, brown, swirled in white clouds, luminous against the dark — they struggled to find words for what they were seeing. During the flyby, Koch radioed Houston: “We hear you can look up and see the moon right now. We see you, too.” Teachers gathered their students around monitors. Children followed the progress and declared their own future plans to become astronauts. Many could see themselves in the crew. 

Each of the four astronauts was once one of those children, shaped by communities that encouraged them to be curious, to reach beyond what seemed possible. Now their work will inform the next mission, which will inform the one after that. This is how progress moves: not in a single leap, but through sustained, iterative effort passed from one set of hands to the next. 

This is also the work of the Wassmuth Center. Every April, our Wassmuth Youth Leaders and Human Rights Education Fellows gather to share what they have built over the year — classroom initiatives, community projects, new strategies for interrupting injustice. We pause to celebrate what they have learned and who they have become, and then they pass the work forward. New cohorts of students and teachers arrive. The questions evolve. The mission continues, shaped by everyone who came before and everyone who will follow. And each year, the crew expands. More voices. More perspectives. More people who see themselves as belonging to the work. 

The day the astronauts splashed down in the Pacific, Commander Reid Wiseman was supposed to leave Rise behind in the capsule for later retrieval. He didn’t. He tucked the little plush into a dry bag and carried it out with him. An eight-year-old’s vision of Earth and Moon together, designed to represent all of us, was too important to leave behind.