NASA announced Tuesday that Chesapeake, Virginia, native Andre Douglas would join three other astronauts on Artemis III, NASA’s next mission set to launch in late 2027. ”My brain, it is going a mile a minute right now, but my heart, it is so warm, it is so full,” Douglas said at a NASA press c onference on Tuesday morning. Douglas will serve as a mission specialist, responsible for maintaining the spacecraft, conducting experiments, and executing mission-specific tasks. He is joined by NASA’s Randy Bresnik and Frank Rubio, as well as the European Space Agency’s Luca Parmitano. This will be Douglas’s first space flight. Previously, he served as an officer in the US Coast Guard, and now is a commander in the Coast Guard Reserve. Douglas, who became an astronaut candidate in 2021, served as the backup crew member for this year’s Artemis II mission, training alongside the eventual crew, including Baltimore native Commander Reid Wiseman. On launch day, he was an Astronaut Support Person responsible for strapping the crew into their seats in the capsule. The Artemis III crew will orbit Earth to practice docking their Orion capsule with lunar landers, a critical step before NASA sends a different Artemis crew to land on the moon in 2028. While he was born in Miami, Florida, Douglas grew up in Chesapeake, Virginia, and graduated from Western Branch High School. He has five degrees, two of which are from DC-area universities: he earned a Master of Science in electrical and computer engineering from Johns Hopkins in 2019, and a Doctorate in systems engineering from George Washington University in 2021. Douglas is far from the first Virginian to go to space—past astronauts include Falls Church native Mark Vande Hei, Charlottesville resident Kathryn C. Thornton, and even John Glenn, who lived in Arlington while serving as a US Senator. Elsewhere in the area, DC native and Anacostia High School graduate Frederick D. Gregory was the first Black man to pilot a space shuttle, and Gaithersburg native Jessica Watkins was the first Black woman to work and live on the International Space Station.The post Virginia’s Andre Douglas Is Headed to Space on Artemis III first appeared on Washingtonian. ...read more read less