Koch and her mission colleagues will get views of the far side of the moon that have never been seen before by humankind. (photo: NASA)
For nearly nine years, NASA had been preparing for a return to the moon. Christina Hammock Koch, a graduate of NCSSM’s Residential Class of 1997 and a former member of NCSSM’s Board of Trustees, had been preparing for it all her life. Now she and three other astronauts are finally on their way to Earth’s celestial satellite as part of Artemis II, which on Wednesday evening launched the world’s first return to the moon’s vicinity since 1972, when the U.S. last landed astronauts there. NCSSM alumni across the country gathered at watch parties from the East to the West Coasts to cheer Koch on.
In a 2016 interview with Glamour, Koch explained that even as a young girl, she dreamed of space. “My bedroom wall in Jacksonville, North Carolina, was covered in posters of the space shuttle alongside ones of New Kids on the Block,” she said. “I had always set my sights on working with NASA . . . I wanted to get there because I was passionate about science and the next frontier.”
Koch and the others soared into space aboard the Orion space capsule, piercing the Earth’s atmosphere thanks to nearly 9 million pounds of thrust created by the Space Launch system, NASA’s newest rocket. It won’t be a straight shot to their destination, though; first they will orbit Earth before slingshotting toward the moon. The entire mission is scheduled to last 10 days.
Koch is no stranger to leaving Earth. She holds the record for longest continuous time in space by a woman, having spent 328 days aboard the International Space Station. While there, she participated in the first all-female spacewalks. In April of 2023 she was announced as a member of the Artemis II crew and began in-depth training for the mission soon thereafter. With the completion of Artemis II, she will become the first woman to have ever journeyed around the moon, part of a crew that will have ventured deeper into space than any previous humans. And even though a cow never actually jumped over the moon, she’ll be the first Unicorn to circle it.
In 2019, students at NCSSM got a chanceto chat live with Koch via an audio and video downlink as she orbited Earth aboard the Space Station. “The motto of the school, ‘Accept the greater challenge’; really, that got ingrained in me at NCSSM,” she told students as she floated in micro gravity while wearing an NCSSM Alumni T shirt. “My whole world opened up to me — just to realize that there was so much to explore, so much to learn. . . I really can’t say enough about the different opportunities I had [at NCSSM] that led me to want to live a life to explore.”
Click here for ways to watch NASA coverage of the Artemis II mission.
