By Burt Dicht
NSS Managing Director of Membership

Early in my career as an aerospace engineer at Northrop, I had the rare opportunity to be directly involved in two first flights: the F-5G / F-20A Tigershark and the YF-23A Advanced Tactical Fighter. These were not incremental upgrades or routine test sorties. In one case, an existing aircraft was fundamentally redesigned around a new engine. In the other, it was an entirely new airframe and engine. Years of design work, testing, and validation ultimately converged into a single irreversible act: the aircraft leaving the runway for the first time.

What stayed with me most was not just the technology, but the intensity of preparation. The test pilots assigned to those first flights spent extraordinary amounts of time reviewing data, rehearsing procedures, walking through contingencies, logging hundreds of hours in simulators, and asking hard questions of the designers. Every system was scrutinized. Every assumption challenged. First flights are unforgiving. There is no prior flight history to lean on, only engineering judgment and trust.

For a test pilot, making a first flight is a rare career milestone. Very few ever do it, and fewer still more than once. It represents the ultimate expression of confidence between engineers and pilots: confidence that the vehicle will fly as designed, and that the human at the controls can respond to the unexpected.

That same dynamic exists in human spaceflight.

That connection is not accidental. In the earliest days of the U.S. space program, beginning with Mercury and continuing through Gemini, Apollo, and the Space Shuttle, many astronauts came directly from the test pilot ranks. Shuttle commanders and pilots, in particular, were often selected precisely because they had experience testing aircraft, pushing envelopes, and working hand in hand with engineers to uncover the unknown. The mindset required for a first flight—discipline, preparation, and the ability to respond decisively to the unexpected—was exactly what early human spaceflight demanded.

For the most recent first flight of Starliner, both Sunita Williams and Butch Wilmore were test pilots before becoming astronauts. They brought with them the same culture of rigor and trust that has defined first flights for generations. Artemis II may fly a new spacecraft, but it rests on a lineage shaped by decades of test flight experience.

When astronauts fly a spacecraft for the first time, they are validating not just hardware and software, but an entire architecture: launch vehicle, spacecraft, ground systems, procedures, and people. Like test pilots, astronauts preparing for a first crewed mission immerse themselves in simulations, failure scenarios, and exhaustive reviews. They know they are stepping into a vehicle without a human track record.

The upcoming Artemis II mission is exactly that kind of flight. While it will include science objectives and deep-space operations, at its core Artemis II is a test flight. It will be the first crewed mission of both the Orion spacecraft and the Space Launch System (SLS). In more than sixty years of human spaceflight, that combination—a brand-new spacecraft carrying astronauts for the first time—has happened only a handful of times.

When Artemis II lifts off, its crew will join that remarkably small and distinguished group. Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, and Christina Koch, along with Jeremy Hansen of the Canadian Space Agency, will become the next astronauts to fly a new human spacecraft on its first crewed mission. In doing so, they will step into a role historically reserved for a select few: astronauts trusted to validate an entirely new system not just for themselves, but for anyone who will follow.

That list is remarkably short, and the milestones it contains fall into two primary categories. Some missions marked the first time both a new spacecraft and a new rocket carried astronauts. Others marked the first crewed flight of either a new launch vehicle or a new spacecraft paired with an already operational system.

First Crewed Spacecraft + First Crewed Rocket

• Mercury-Redstone 3 (1961) – Alan Shepard became the first American in space, flying the Mercury capsule on a Redstone rocket.
• Gemini 3 – Titan II (1965) – Gus Grissom and John Young flew the first crewed Gemini spacecraft atop a Titan II rocket.
• Apollo 7 – Saturn IB (1968) – Walter Schirra, Donn Eisele, and Walter Cunningham conducted the first crewed test of the Apollo Command Module in Earth orbit aboard a Saturn IB rocket.
• STS-1 (1981) – John Young, on his second first flight, this time with Robert Crippen, flew the Space Shuttle on its inaugural mission.
• Crew Dragon Demo-2 – Falcon 9 (2020) – Robert Behnken and Douglas Hurley restored U.S. crewed launch capability with SpaceX’s first crewed Dragon flight aboard a Falcon 9 rocket.
• Starliner Crew Flight Test – Atlas V (2024) – Butch Wilmore and Sunita Williams flew Boeing’s CST-100 Starliner on its first crewed mission aboard an Atlas V rocket.
• Artemis II – Orion / SLS (Planned 2026) – The Artemis II crew will fly the Orion spacecraft for the first time aboard the Space Launch System rocket.

Operational Spacecraft + First Crewed Rocket

• Mercury-Atlas 6 (1962) – John Glenn flew on the third Mercury mission, marking the first Mercury flight atop an Atlas rocket rather than the Redstone used by Shepard and Grissom.
• Apollo 8 (1968) – Crewed by Frank Borman, Jim Lovell, and William Anders, this was only the second crewed Apollo mission, yet it marked the first time humans flew on a Saturn V, then the most powerful rocket ever built.

One mission stands somewhat apart: Apollo 9, which marked the first crewed flight of the Lunar Module (LM), with James McDivitt and Russell Schweickart testing the spacecraft that would ultimately make lunar landings possible. Unlike the capsules that launched from Earth, the LM was first flown by astronauts already in orbit, making it a distinct but equally important type of first.

But the evolution of human spaceflight has added another category of first flights: privately developed crewed systems.

In 2004, SpaceShipOne completed the first privately funded human spaceflights, winning the Ansari X-Prize. In 2021, Blue Origin’s New Shepard carried its first crew on a fully commercial suborbital flight.

While these commercial missions were suborbital, they too represent significant milestones in the broader history of human spaceflight. As commercial systems such as Starship and New Glenn move toward crewed capability, this list of “firsts” will continue to grow.

Human spaceflight advances in stages. Most missions refine established systems. Only occasionally does a completely new crewed system take flight. Artemis II is one of those occasions. It joins a short list of missions in which astronauts have flown a new spacecraft and launch vehicle for the first time.

Programs evolve. Architectures change. Technologies improve. But the milestone of a first crewed flight remains a distinct chapter in the history of spaceflight.

Top image from left to right, Artemis II NASA astronauts Reid Wiseman, commander; Victor Glover, pilot, and Christina Koch, mission specialist, and CSA (Canadian Space Agency) Jeremy Hansen, mission specialist, pose for a photograph during rollout of NASA’s Artemis II SLS (Space Launch System) rocket and Orion spacecraft to Launch Complex 39B. Image Credit: NASA/Kim Shiflett.