CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (AP) — An international astronaut will join U.S. astronauts on the Moon by the end of the decade, under a deal announced Wednesday by NASA and the White House.
The news came as Vice President Kamala Harris convened a meeting in Washington of the National Space Council, the third such meeting under the Biden administration.
There was no mention of who the international moonwalker might be or even what country would be represented. A NASA spokeswoman later said crews would be assigned closer to the moon landing missions and that no commitments had yet been made to any other country.
NASA has been pairing international astronauts with space travel for decades. Canadian Jeremy Hansen will circle the Moon in about a year with three American astronauts.
Another crew would indeed land; it would be the first astronaut landing on the Moon in more than half a century. This is unlikely to happen before 2027, according to the U.S. Government Accountability Office.
All 12 people who walked on the moon during NASA’s Apollo program in the 1960s and 1970s were American citizens. The space agency’s new moon exploration program is named Artemis, in homage to Apollo’s mythological twin sister.
The inclusion of international partners “is not only sincerely appreciated, but also urgently needed in today’s world,” Hansen told the Council.
NASA has long emphasized the need for global cooperation in space, entering into the Artemis Accords with the U.S. State Department in 2020 to promote responsible behavior not only on the Moon but throughout space. Representatives from the 33 countries that have signed the agreements so far were expected at the space council meeting in Washington.
“We know from experience that collaboration in space is effective,” Secretary of State Antony Blinken said, citing the Webb Space Telescope, a U.S., European and Canadian effort.
Notably absent from the Artemis agreements: Russia and China, the only countries, besides the United States, to launch their own citizens into orbit. Russia is a partner of NASA in the International Space Station, alongside Europe, Japan and Canada. Even earlier in the 1990s, the Russian and American space agencies teamed up under the shuttle program to launch their respective astronauts to the former Russian orbital station Mir.
At Wednesday’s meeting, Harris also announced new policies aimed at ensuring the safe use of space as more private companies and countries set their sights on the skies. Among the problems the United States seeks to solve: the climate crisis and the growing amount of space debris around Earth. A 2021 anti-satellite missile test by Russia added more than 1,500 pieces of potentially dangerous orbital debris, and Blinken joined others at the meeting to call on all nations to end such destructive tests.
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