A Santa Monica native and retired Marine colonel will take the helm of one of the most ambitious American space missions since the Apollo era.
NASA announced Tuesday that Randy Bresnik has been named commander of the Artemis III mission, a complex orbital test flight scheduled for 2027 that will lay critical groundwork for the first crewed American return to the lunar surface in more than half a century.
Bresnik, who graduated from Santa Monica High School in 1985 and whose father still lives in the city, will lead a four-person crew on a roughly two-week mission to low Earth orbit — one that NASA officials describe as the most intricately choreographed multi-launch campaign in spaceflight history.
"Today we take another bold step in humanity's return to the Moon," said NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman. "Artemis III will demonstrate the power of American innovation and international partnership as we test complex rendezvous and docking operations and advance the technologies that will one day carry us deeper into the solar system."
A Decorated Career in the Air and in Space
Bresnik's path from Santa Monica to the commander's seat of a Moon-program spacecraft spans more than three decades of military service, test piloting, and human spaceflight.
After graduating from Santa Monica High School, Bresnik earned a Bachelor of Arts in mathematics from The Citadel in Charleston, South Carolina, in 1989, was commissioned as a second lieutenant in the U.S. Marine Corps, and was designated a naval aviator in April 1992. He later earned a Master of Science in aviation systems from the University of Tennessee-Knoxville and graduated from Air War College in 2008. The Citadel later awarded him an honorary doctorate in aeronautics.
His military aviation career took him from initial F/A-18 training on the East Coast to deployments in the Western Pacific, and eventually to the U.S. Naval Test Pilot School at NAS Patuxent River, Maryland, where he graduated at the top of his class. He attended both the Marine Corps Weapons and Tactics Instructors Course and the Naval Fighter Weapons School — better known as TOPGUN. In early 2003, he deployed to Kuwait, flying combat missions in the F/A-18 in support of Operation Iraqi Freedom.
Bresnik was selected by NASA as an astronaut candidate in May 2004 and completed his first spaceflight aboard Space Shuttle Atlantis on the STS-129 mission in November 2009, during which he performed two spacewalks totaling nearly 12 hours. He returned to the International Space Station in 2017 aboard the Soyuz MS-05 spacecraft, serving as a flight engineer during Expedition 52 and commanding the station during Expedition 53. Over the course of that mission, the crew conducted more than 300 scientific experiments, worked with four visiting space vehicles, and Bresnik performed three additional spacewalks. In total, he has logged more than 32 hours of EVA time across five spacewalks, and over 3,600 hours in spacecraft.
He has also pushed boundaries on Earth in preparation for deep space — training as a "cave-a-naut" in the caves of Sardinia, Italy, for the European Space Agency's CAVES analog mission, and commanding NASA's NEEMO 19 underwater research mission off the coast of Key Largo, Florida.
A retired colonel with more than 7,000 hours logged in 95 types of aircraft, Bresnik is a fellow of the Society of Experimental Test Pilots. Since 2018, he has served as assistant to the chief of NASA's Astronaut Office for Exploration, overseeing the development and testing of every system slated to operate on Artemis missions — from Orion and the Space Launch System to lunar rovers and surface exploration suits.
Artemis III will be his third spaceflight.
The Mission
Bresnik will be joined by ESA astronaut Luca Parmitano as pilot, making Parmitano the first European Space Agency astronaut ever assigned to an Artemis mission. NASA astronauts Andre Douglas and Frank Rubio round out the crew as mission specialists, with NASA astronaut Bob Hines named as a backup crew member.
Artemis III will not land on the Moon — that milestone is reserved for Artemis IV, currently scheduled for 2028. Instead, the 2027 mission is designed to test the full stack of hardware and systems that will make a lunar landing possible, particularly the docking interfaces between NASA's Orion spacecraft and the commercial human landing systems being developed by Blue Origin and SpaceX.
The mission profile calls for a dramatic sequence of launches. Blue Origin's lander test article — a pathfinder version of its Blue Moon spacecraft capable of remaining in orbit for multiple weeks — will launch first and await the crew in low Earth orbit. NASA will then launch the Artemis III crew aboard Orion atop the Space Launch System rocket from Kennedy Space Center in Florida. After orbital checkouts, Orion will rendezvous and dock with the Blue Origin pathfinder for approximately two days of integrated systems testing, including crew entry into the lander.
After completing docked operations with Blue Origin, Orion will undock and await the arrival of SpaceX's Starship pathfinder, which will rendezvous with the crew for an additional day of docking checkouts. The crew will then undock from Starship and return to Earth, splashing down in the Pacific Ocean for recovery by U.S. Navy and NASA teams.
The full mission is expected to last approximately two weeks, with the exact duration determined in real-time based on launch windows, rendezvous timing, and docked operations.
Engineers are already deep into hardware preparations. Orion's crew module and service module are scheduled to be connected this summer, along with integration of the spacecraft's docking system, which will fly for the first time. SLS rocket stacking is also set to begin this summer at Kennedy Space Center.
The data and operational experience gathered during Artemis III will directly inform Artemis IV — the mission that will carry American astronauts back to the lunar surface for the first time since Apollo 17 in 1972.
— Edited by SMDP Staff