'An incredible privilege and responsibility': Artemis 2's Christina Koch is ready to become the 1st woman to fly around the moon

Christina Koch is ready to make history.

Koch is one of the four astronauts of Artemis 2, which is scheduled to launch on its round-the-moon mission no earlier than April 1. During her career as a NASA astronaut, she has spent more than 300 days aboard the International Space Station, and she performed the first all-woman spacewalk with Jessica Meir. Artemis 2 will make her the first woman ever to go beyond low Earth orbit (LEO).

Koch's crewmates are NASA commander Reid Wiseman, NASA pilot Victor Glover (who will become the first Black person to leave LEO) and Canadian Space Agency mission specialist Jeremy Hansen (the first non-American to leave LEO).

The quartet will spend 10 days in space, if all goes to plan. They will first test their Orion spacecraft in Earth orbit to see how it behaves with its first human crew, then make a trans-lunar injection maneuver to slingshot around the moon and back. Artemis 2 is designed to help lay the foundation for a crewed moon landing on Artemis 4, in 2028.

Space.com spoke with Koch in September 2025 during an Artemis 2 event at NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston. Below are her remarks during the interview, edited for space and clarity.

"It feels like an incredible privilege and responsibility [to be on Artemis 2]. As a crew, I feel like we consolidated really quickly. That's just a set of values that we've all developed living in the astronaut corps for so many years, and so we felt crew-like very quickly.

"But what has happened in the last few months, for me, is the consolidation and momentum that's building in the wider team — the flight control team, the launch control team. We are firing on all cylinders with those guys doing problem solving [and] answering questions that no one knows the real answer to. Every person that walks into every room is just ready to contribute the most that they can, and to get to the right answer as a team. And it has been awesome.

"For me, it's bigger than [our crew]. There's levels. Obviously, our crew cohesion and the respect we have from each other — for each other — is so important to get the job done, to get the mission done as successfully as possible, and [as] safely as possible. And building that out to a wider team, to me, is just as important, if not more important. I think we stand on their shoulders. We wouldn't be here if it weren't for our wider teams.

I think for me, [Artemis 2] comes down to not being any single individual's accomplishments. The accomplishment that we can celebrate together is that we got here. Decades ago, we made the right decisions so that our astronaut corps brings diverse backgrounds together to solve the hardest problems. And that, to me, is what's truly worth celebrating, and what I'm honored to be a part of."