Artemis II Crew Visits Naval Base San Diego

From left to right, NASA astronaut Victor Glover, Canadian Space Agency astronaut Jeremy Hansen, NASA astronauts Reid Wiseman and Christina Hammock Koch, pose with teams from NASA’s Exploration Ground Systems Program and sailors from the U.S. Navy assigned to Amphibious Construction Battalion 1 during a tour of Defense Distribution Depot Center in San Diego, California, on July 19, 2023. The depot is currently being used by NASA to house the Vehicle Advanced Demonstrator for Emergency Recovery, “VADER”, a replica of the space capsule. In preparation for NASA's Artemis II crewed mission, which will send four astronauts in Orion beyond the Moon, NASA and the U.S. Navy will conduct a series of tests to demonstrate and evaluate the processes, procedures, and hardware used in recovery operations for crewed lunar missions. The approximately 10-day flight of Artemis II will test NASA's foundational human deep space exploration capabilities, the Space Launch System rocket and Orion spacecraft, for the first time with astronauts and will pave the way to establishing a long-term presence at the Moon for science and exploration through Artemis.