Black SoCal native is pilot of flight to moon
Victor Glover is first Black astronaut to fly to the moon
Wave Staff and Wire Reports
LOS ANGELES — A Black Southern California native is set to become the first person of color to take part in a lunar mission.
Victor Glover, who was born in Pomona, attended Ontario High School and graduated from Cal Poly San Luis Obispo, is serving as pilot of the Orion spacecraft that lifted off from Kennedy Space Center in Florida April 1.
NASA’s Artemis II mission is the first crewed lunar mission in more than 50 years, sending four astronauts on a roughly 10-day journey around the moon and back.
“The Artemis II crew represents thousands of people working tirelessly to bring us to the stars,” then-NASA Administrator Bill Nelson said in 2023 when announcing the team. “This is their crew, this is our crew, this is humanity’s crew.
“NASA astronauts Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover and Christina Hammock Koch, and CSA astronaut Jeremy Hansen, each has their own story, but, together, they represent our creed: E pluribus unum — out of many, one. Together, we are ushering in a new era of exploration for a new generation of star sailors and dreamers — the Artemis Generation.”
Glover spent more than five months aboard the International Space Station in 2020-21, traveling there aboard SpaceX’s first full crew rotation flight by a U.S. commercial spacecraft.
Glover also has extensive ties to Southern California beyond his upbringing, having served as a test pilot at Naval Air Weapons Station China Lake in the Mojave Desert and earning a master’s degree from Air University at Edwards Air Force Base.
As one of NASA’s few Black astronauts, Glover sees his presence on the mission as “a force for good.”
The 49-year-old Navy captain and former combat pilot makes it a habit to listen to Gil Scott-Heron’s “Whitey on the Moon” and Marvin Gaye’s “Make Me Wanna Holler” from the white-dominated Apollo era.
“I listen to those for perspective,” he said. “It captures what we did well, what we did poorly.”
The ability for him now to offer hope to others is “an amazing blessing and a privilege,” he said.
Despite having one spaceflight behind him — an early SpaceX crew run to the International Space Station — he finds himself in new personal territory. His four daughters are in their late teens and early 20s, “and I spend as an much time and thought preparing them as NASA does preparing me.”
He said he is hyper-focused on running “our best race so that we can hand the baton off to the next leg” — a 2027 practice docking mission in orbit around Earth between an Orion crew capsule and one or two lunar landers. The all-important moon landing would follow in 2028 with yet another set of astronauts.
Glover was selected as an astronaut in 2013 while serving as a legislative fellow in the U.S. Senate. He is one of 18 Black astronauts that have served NASA since the inception of the astronaut program.
Commander Wiseman, pilot Glover and mission specialists Koch and Hansen arrived at Kennedy Space Center last week to begin final launch preparations. The Artemis II mission will not land on the moon but will travel thousands of miles beyond it, providing astronauts with views of the lunar far side before returning to Earth.
Once the spacecraft departs Earth orbit, communications will be handled in part by NASA’s Deep Space Network, which is managed by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena.
The mission is part of NASA’s Artemis program, which aims to return humans to the moon for the first time since the Apollo era and eventually establish a sustained presence there.
