The spacecraft that will carry astronauts to lunar realms for the first time in more than half a century now has a name.
The four astronauts of NASA’s Artemis 2 mission, who could launch on their trip around the moon as early as Feb. 5, announced today (Sept. 24) that they have named their Orion capsule “Integrity.”
“The name Integrity embodies the foundation of trust, respect, candor and humility across the crew and the many engineers, technicians, scientists, planners and dreamers required for mission success,” NASA officials said in a statement today.
“The name is also a nod to the extensive integrated effort — from the more than 300,000 spacecraft components to the thousands of people across the world — that must come together to venture to the moon and back, inspire the world and set course for a long-term presence at the moon,” they added.
The Artemis 2 crew consists of commander Reid Wiseman, pilot Victor Glover and mission specialists Christina Koch and Jeremy Hansen. The first three are all NASA astronauts, while Hansen represents the Canadian Space Agency.
The quartet will launch atop a Space Launch System rocket during a window that extends from Feb. 5 to April 26 of next year. The astronauts will fly Integrity on a loop around the moon and back home again, on a mission that will last about 10 Earth days.
Artemis 2 won’t land on or orbit the moon. But it will be the first crewed mission to reach the lunar neighborhood since Apollo 17 in December 1972. And it will pave the way for Artemis 3, which will put astronauts down near the moon’s south pole in 2027, if all goes according to plan.
And things are designed to accelerate from there: The Artemis program aims to establish a permanent, sustainable human presence on and around the moon, and to use the lessons learned via this effort to send astronauts to Mars.
The Artemis 2 crew didn’t just pick “Integrity” out of a hat; arriving at the name was a long and drawn-out process, Wiseman said today during a press event at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston.
“We got the four of us together and our backups, Jenny Gibbons from the Canadian Space Agency and Andre Douglas from NASA, and we went over to the quarantine facility here,” Wiseman said. “We basically locked ourselves in there until we came up with a name.”
They started with a lot of candidate monikers, he added.
“As we worked our way through this, we went big to small, which this crew does so well,” Wiseman said. “And we started with the NASA core values, and then we looked at the Canadian Space Agency core values. And then we talked about what matters to us most in our core values. And then we looked out at what is going on with Artemis 2. What do we want this to be?”
In the end, he said, the crew determined that their chief goal for the mission is to help provide some “peace and hope for all humankind.”
“So, we are bringing together the world,” Wiseman said. “We are bringing together an amazing workforce, and they are bringing together an amazing vehicle. And at the end of all that, when you squeeze it all down, it created magic. So we’re going to fly around the moon in the spacecraft Integrity.”
It’s a tradition in the human spaceflight world for a new spacecraft to be named by the first astronauts to fly it. For example, a SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule made its debut this past June, on the private Ax-4 astronaut mission to the International Space Station. The Ax-4 crew gave that Dragon its name: Grace.