A SoCal native is set to pilot NASAs lunar mission and become the first Black person to reach the moon

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NASA’s Artemis II mission, the first to send humans around the moon in half a century, is slated to launch Wednesday.It will be piloted by one of Southern California’s own.Victor Glover — a former Ontario High School wrestler and Navy test pilot who often wears his excitement on his royal-blue jumpsuit sleeve — will be the first Black person to reach the moon.

The mission is a lunar flyby, so the crew will not land on the moon or enter lunar orbit.Glover, 49, became the first Black person to serve on an International Space Station expedition in 2020.“That cannot be right,” Livingston Holder, a former manned spaceflight engineer with the Air Force and space shuttle payload specialist, recalled thinking when he first heard that fact.

“How can we go two decades without flying a Black astronaut on a full mission to the station? How can that possibly be?”Yet, it’s true: Several trailblazing Black astronauts stayed aboard for several days while helping build the ISS on space shuttle missions.None had lived aboard for months on end as an expedition crew member afterward.For Glover, the achievement — and title of “first” — stirred complicated feelings.

In the flurries of media interviews that come with life as an astronaut, he acknowledged the deep responsibility he felt toward the next generations of Black astronauts he hoped to inspire.At the same time, he often reframed his role into NASA’s greater mission and pointed to the many Black trailblazers, such as Holder, before him.“He’d probably been the first Black person to do X, Y or Z,” said Holder, whose planned mission to space was ultimately canceled after the Challenger disaster in 1986.

And since Glover, a team player, was not the first person to serve on an ISS expedition or reach the moon, but instead the first Black person to do so, “I don’t think he really wanted to emphasize ‘I’m...