Victor Glover

Meet an astronaut who will be blasting off to the Moon next year.

In 2024, astronaut Victor Glover will be part of the first crew to travel to the Moon in more than 50 years. As the pilot, he will fly the spaceship, named Orion, around the Moon  but Orion won’t land on the surface. “Our mission – Artemis II – is to make sure that the Orion spacecraft is safe for the more complicated missions,” Glover told The Week Junior Science+Nature. “It’s just one step on that really long journey that is eventually going to wind up with sending the first human on to Mars.” Glover must also make sure all systems are working properly. “If that toilet breaks, we’re going to have four unhappy people up there.”

Life in space

Glover is an experienced astronaut and, between 2020 and 2021, spent nearly six months living on the International Space Station (ISS). The ISS is a space base orbiting planet Earth. Lots of scientific experiments are performed there.

Life in space is strange. First of all, the small amount of gravity (the force that pulls things towards the ground) on the ISS compared to Earth means that people and heavy objects float about easily. This not because there is no gravity, but because the spacecraft, the crew, and everything on board is falling toward Earth. Since they all fall at the same speed, everything appears to be

 To the Moon… and beyond