SoCal native set to be the first Black person to reach the moon

The Artemis II mission, NASA’s first mission to send humans around the moon in half a century, is scheduled to launch Wednesday. It will be piloted by a pilot in Southern California.

Victor Glover, a former Ontario High School wrestler and Navy test pilot who often wears his excitement on the sleeve of his royal blue jumpsuit, will be the first Black person to reach the moon. Since the mission is a lunar mission, 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.

Livingston Holder, a former air force manned spaceflight engineer and space shuttle payload specialist, recalled thinking, “This can’t be true” when he first heard about it. “How can we go twenty years without flying a black astronaut to the station on a full mission? How can that be?”

Yet it’s true: Many groundbreaking Black astronauts stayed on board for several days while helping build the ISS on space shuttle missions. None of them had subsequently lived on the ship for months as an expedition member.

For Glover, this achievement and the “first” title stirred up mixed emotions. In the hectic media interviews that come with life as an astronaut, he acknowledged the deep responsibility he feels to the next generation of Black astronauts he hopes to inspire. At the same time, he often reframed his role as NASA’s larger mission and pointed to the many Black pioneers like Holder before him.

“He was probably the first black person to do X, Y or Z,” said Holder, whose planned space mission was canceled after the Challenger disaster in 1986. And Glover, a team player, was not the first person to serve on an ISS expedition or reach the moon, but instead the first person. Black “I don’t think he really wanted to emphasize ‘I’m the first,'” Holder added.

Glover wasn’t actually supposed to be the first Black person to serve on the ISS expedition. In 2018, Jeanette Epps was scheduled to participate in a Russian Soyuz mission to the ISS; This would have given him that title, but five months before the mission NASA suddenly he pulled her aside without explanation.

And while he was on the ISS, many Black Americans, including Glover, had to grapple with more Earthly challenges. Just months before the launch, a white police officer killed George Floyd on the streets of Minneapolis.

It’s a familiar tension in black America: The Apollo program began at the height of the civil rights movement. Many people criticized the program as a distraction from the country’s problems and a waste of money that the government could instead use to improve the lives of ordinary Americans.

Glover during lunar mission training I listened to the poem “Whitey on the Moon,” written by the late Black poet and jazz musician Gil Scott-Heron, expresses these debates in a painful and eloquent way each week as he commutes to work in the morning to concentrate on his work.

Glover undergoes spacesuit checks in the crew room dressing room in the Neil A. Armstrong Operations and Payments Building as part of the agency’s Artemis II Countdown Demonstration Test at the Kennedy Space Center on Dec. 20, 2025.

(NASA/Glenn Benson)

For Glover, space exploration is an opportunity to lift up all Americans and invest in technology that creates hope for a better future.

“When you’re the first person in your family to go to college, the first person to get a doctorate from your school… that’s important for all people who start where you started,” Holder said. Now they can say: “’Oh, that’s like that possible.'”

Glover’s example for Black parents in Pomona and beyond who see the next generation of NASA astronauts in their cute, nerdy kids: deep meaning.

Born in Pomona in 1976, Glover was an adrenaline junkie who dreamed of being everything from a stuntman to a race car driver. His parents, who were police officers and accountants, piqued his curiosity. The young astronaut candidate also looked up to his grandfather, who joined the Air Force during the Korean War but reportedly couldn’t fly because of his race.

When young Glover watched a space shuttle launch on television, he immediately wanted to do it. to spread thing.

His first attempt to leave the world was through sports. pole vault, To be specific. During his time at Ontario High School and Cal Poly San Luis Obispo, Glover added football to the mix, ultimately becoming best known for his wrestling prowess (feeling notwithstanding). quite scared by then-college teammate Chuck Liddell, who eventually became an MMA star).

Gregg Givens, an English teacher who was then coaching football in Ontario, remembered Glover as a very nice, very smart kid. “He was walking towards his own drummer,” Givens said. “I know that’s a cliché way of saying things, but… he was going to do what Victor would do.”

Glover enlisted in the Navy in 1998 after earning a bachelor’s degree in engineering. During his 15 years in the military, he accumulated 3,500 flight hours in more than 40 aircraft, earning several master’s degrees along the way and serving in 24 combat missions.

One of his commanders gave him a call sign from his NASA days: “Ike” meaning “I know everything.” (This was a sentiment Glover’s four daughters certainly appreciated. a family man at heartHe checks in from space to help them with their homework.)

Like many before him, including Neil Armstrong, the first man to walk on the moon, Glover cut his teeth as a test pilot in Mojave. He attended test pilot school at Edwards Air Force Base, site of many of Armstrong’s daring flights and space shuttle landings, then served with the Navy’s Dust Devil test pilot squadron at China Lake, California.

Glover happened to be in Washington D.C. in 2013 to serve as a Navy legislator. miss a phone call From NASA. After frantically calling again, he got the news: He was one of eight chosen from a pool of more than 6,000 for the space agency’s 21st class of astronauts.

She won’t be the only “first” to ride the capsule on Artemis II: NASA astronaut Christina Koch is set to become the first woman to reach the moon, and Canadian Space Agency astronaut Jeremy Hansen is set to become the first non-American to do so.

Holder, whom Glover points to as a mentor, is happy to live vicariously through Glover’s generation of Black astronauts.

Holder, now co-founder of a spaceflight startup, on a recent trip to Australia Radian Aviationstopped by one of many stations Help astronauts communicate with Earth To send a message to Glover before launch:

“Thanks to you, we’re all going to the moon.”