NASA chose the right crew to launch a new era of human space exploration

“It’s a special thing to be human, and it’s a special thing to be on planet Earth.” HOUSTON—Their mission is complete. The four people who flew beyond the Moon on NASA’s Artemis II mission are back home in Houston with their families. But the lessons from Artemis II are just beginning to be told. There are tangible, objective takeaways from the nine-day mission. How did NASA’s Space Launch System rocket perform? Nearly perfectly. Was the Orion spacecraft up to the job of flying to the Moon and back? Absolutely. Will engineers need to make any changes before the next Artemis mission? Yes, and that’s not terribly surprising for a program that, 20 years in, has just flown a crew to space for the first time. Ars has covered the technical lessons from Artemis II, such as hydrogen leaks on the launch pad, helium leaks in space, and a toilet that wasn’t always available for No. 1. But there’s something else that must be said. NASA struck gold when it selected the astronauts to fly on the Artemis II mission. NASA’s opaque formula for picking space crews worked three years ago when Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, Christina Koch, and Jeremy Hansen strode across the stage inside Hangar 135 at El