Photo: AFP / Mark Felix
Astronauts Jeremy Hansen, Victor Glover, Reid Wiseman and Christina Hammock Koch stand onstage after being selected for the Artemis II mission.
As NASA names the four astronauts who will take humanity back to the moon, after a 50-year gap, New Zealand's space sector also looks to benefit.
On Monday, NASA and the Canadian Space Agency (CSA) announced the four astronauts who will venture around the Moon on Artemis II, the first crewed mission in more than 50 years.
Christina Koch will become the first woman astronaut ever assigned to a lunar mission, while Victor Glover will be the first black astronaut on one.
They will join Reid Wiseman and Jeremy Hansen - who will also be the first Canadian on a lunar mission - to fly a capsule around the moon late next year or early in 2025.
The space agency hopes to establish the first long-term presence on the moon and, using knowledge gleaned from those efforts, send the first humans to Mars.
Kate Breach is a space sector consultant and Aerospace Engineer, as well as the chair of Women in Space Aotearoa, She says the newly announced crew couldn't be more different to what space crews looked like in the Apollo era.
"It's incredibly important, so yes over 630 people have been into space from around the world, but only 72 of them have been women, so still a very small proportion," she says.
"The new intakes of astronauts in different countries are seeing more proportion of women coming in.
"In order to show that this is a career pathway and a sector that's open to everybody, we need to be able to see people who look a little more like everyone else, who've got a pathway to getting there."
Breach says that across the global space sector, only about 20 percent of the workforce is female.
"So we really need to see an increase, not just in women but in other underrepresented groups as well."
And there could also be more opportunities created for New Zealand's own space sector - which is already contributing to various space exploration missions.
Breach describes NASA's latest push as a new global era in space exploration.
"What we're seeing is that more nations across the globe are actually investigating and developing programmes to both go to the moon but also to expand exploration of our solar system, whether it's to Mars, to asteroids, there are missions going to Venus," she says.
And the technologies developed may also be beneficial for us back on Earth - particularly in remote areas.
"It could be different ways to have medical treatments for people who are remote, which might help in say Antarctica or maybe some remote Pacific islands and different technologies that can be really resilient can really help us back on Earth, in some really hostile environments, or in helping to recover from disasters and things like that," Breach says.
Rocket Lab have created opportunities for New Zealand's space sector. Photo: Twitter / Rocket Lab
Scientists in New Zealand are already participating in a mission that the European Space Agency will launch with NASA to measure gravimetric waves.
"This is the LISA Mission and they can try and understand a little bit more of how some big cosmic things were initiated in our universe."
And our scientists are also contributing to the commercial space sector.
"So we have Rocket Lab obviously who're developing some spacecraft for a NASA Mars mission called Mars Escapade - so there's jobs right now building spacecraft that will go to Mars," she says.
"So there's actually a huge amount of both science and also the technology development that New Zealand's already participating in and I think it will only increase as we're seeing greater collaboration between the likes of NASA and New Zealand."
