On June 9, 2026, NASA named Italian astronaut Luca Parmitano as pilot of Artemis 3, making him the first European ever assigned to an Artemis crew — and within hours ESA's director general framed the seat not as a courtesy but as the opening move in a ne - Space Daily

On 9 June 2026, inside a room at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston, the agency named the four people who will fly Artemis 3 — and one of them was not American. Italian astronaut Luca Parmitano was introduced as the mission’s pilot, the first European Space Agency astronaut ever assigned to an Artemis crew. […]