# Victor Glover and the Black road back to the Moon > Black's Encyclopedia — the sourced record of Black American life. > Portal: History & Migration · Status: In review · Revised: July 11, 2026 · Revisions: 1 > Brought to the record by @issa > Canonical: https://www.blacksencyclopedia.com/record/victor-glover-and-the-black-road-back-to-the-moon ## Questions this record answers - Did a Black astronaut really fly to the Moon, and what did Victor Glover do? - Was Victor Glover the first Black person in space, or just the first to go to the Moon? - How did Victor Glover become a NASA astronaut and pilot the Artemis II mission? - What makes Victor Glover’s time on the International Space Station historically important? - How does Victor Glover fit into the longer story of Black people in flight and space exploration? ## Summary Victor Glover is the astronaut who piloted NASA’s Artemis II mission around the Moon, becoming the first Black person to travel to the Moon and to leave low Earth orbit on a deep-space voyage. His role on Artemis II and his earlier tour on the International Space Station mark him as one of the key authors of humanity’s return to the Moon and of the working life of long-duration spaceflight. Before Artemis, Glover had already helped build the modern era of space travel as pilot of SpaceX’s Crew-1 mission, the first operational crewed flight of the Crew Dragon spacecraft, and as the first Black American astronaut to live aboard the International Space Station for an extended expedition. In each of these roles he was not a symbol placed on top of someone else’s work; he was the pilot, test aviator, and engineer whose decisions and training moved the spacecraft and the mission itself. ## The archive's standing Victor Glover is a principal author of the new age of human spaceflight, not a footnote to it. As a test pilot, long‑duration spacefarer, and Artemis II pilot, he helped prove that commercial crew vehicles could safely ferry astronauts, that Black astronauts would be present as builders of the International Space Station’s working life, and that the road back to the Moon would be flown with him at the controls. The archive files him as a continuation of a Black flight tradition that runs from barnstormers and Tuskegee Airmen through Guion Bluford and Mae Jemison into deep space, and as the first to carry that lineage around the Moon. The wider world’s renewed lunar ambitions, and the record‑setting human distance from Earth on Artemis II, were not abstract achievements; they were missions flown by Glover and his crewmates, and the archive credits him accordingly. ## From Pomona to the cockpit Victor Jerome Glover Jr. was born on April 30, 1976, in Pomona, California, and grew up moving between communities shaped by military service and working‑class life, a childhood he later described as giving him both roots and range in American geography and culture. He earned a Bachelor of Science in general engineering from California Polytechnic State University in 1999, then pursued advanced technical and military study with a Master of Science in flight test engineering from the Air University’s U.S. Air Force Test Pilot School, a Master of Science in systems engineering, and a Master of Military Operational Art and Science. Glover entered the United States Navy and became a naval aviator, flying F/A‑18 Hornets and Super Hornets and serving as a test pilot on multiple aircraft. Over his career he accumulated roughly 4,000 flight hours in more than 40 different aircraft, more than 400 arrested carrier landings, and dozens of combat missions, building the high‑risk decision‑making and systems knowledge that NASA relies on for crewed exploration. When NASA selected him as an astronaut candidate in 2013, he was already part of a Black military flight tradition that had spent generations proving airpower and aeronautical skill while the official record often looked elsewhere. ## Building ISS life and commercial crew After completing astronaut training in 2015, Glover was assigned as pilot of SpaceX Crew‑1, the first operational crewed mission of the Crew Dragon spacecraft. That flight, launched in November 2020, was a turning point in NASA’s Commercial Crew Program: a privately built spacecraft carrying a full crew to orbit as a regular transport system rather than a test. As pilot, Glover’s job was not ceremonial; he was responsible with the commander for vehicle performance, navigation, and safety from ascent through docking and return. Crew‑1 carried Glover to the International Space Station, where he served as a flight engineer on Expedition 64/65 and became the first Black American astronaut to live aboard the ISS for an extended expedition rather than as a short‑stay shuttle visitor. His mission lasted 168 days, during which he participated in four spacewalks to maintain and upgrade the station’s exterior systems. In the archive’s frame, this makes him one of the builders of the ISS as a working laboratory, a person whose hands and judgment kept the infrastructure of orbit running, and whose presence corrected an earlier era in which Black astronauts were admitted to space but rarely positioned at the center of long‑duration station life. ## Artemis II and the Black return to the Moon On April 3, 2023, NASA named Glover as the pilot of Artemis II, the first crewed lunar mission in more than fifty years and the proving flight for the Orion spacecraft and Space Launch System rocket. When Artemis II launched on April 1, 2026, with commander Reid Wiseman, mission specialist Christina Koch, and Canadian astronaut Jeremy Hansen, Glover’s role was once again to fly the vehicle: managing Orion’s systems, assisting with navigation and propulsion, and helping guide the crew through the mission’s critical burns and trajectory corrections. During the approximately ten‑day flight, Artemis II traveled around the Moon and out to a record distance from Earth—over 252,000 miles at its farthest point—making Glover and his crewmates the humans who have ventured farthest from the planet. In doing so, Glover became the first Black astronaut to leave low Earth orbit and to travel to the vicinity of the Moon, a milestone that sits alongside earlier firsts by Guion Bluford and Mae Jemison but extends the lineage into deep space. The archive treats this not as a symbolic “breaking of a barrier” but as a concrete authorship: the first return of humans to the lunar neighborhood was flown, in part, by a Black pilot whose expertise had been built through years of testing aircraft and flying spacecraft. ## Lineage: from Tuskegee to deep space Glover’s career stands inside a longer Black history of flight and exploration. Tuskegee Airmen in World War II proved that Black pilots could master high‑performance aircraft even as the state tried to confine them to segregated units; later aviators and astronauts built on that foundation, from Ed Dwight’s contested near‑selection in the 1960s to Bluford’s first flight in 1983 and Jemison’s in 1992. Glover’s path through engineering school, Navy aviation, test pilot work, and astronaut training shows how that tradition continued: Black pilots did not cease when formal segregation ended; they filled the cockpits of modern jets, learned the newest systems, and carried that knowledge into space. In that lineage, Glover’s extended stay on the ISS and his piloting of Artemis II answer a long‑standing question of visibility. Black people were present in the infrastructures of American flight and space well before the public record fully admitted them; the archive reads his missions as evidence that when the nation finally returned to lunar flight, it did so using skills and experience partly authored by Black aviators. The road back to the Moon is therefore a migration story as well: a movement from segregated training fields to the command deck of a deep‑space spacecraft, carried forward by people like Glover whose work repositions Black presence from the margins to the center of human exploration. ## Mentorship, family, and the next generation Alongside his missions, Glover has been outspoken about mentorship, family, and faith as sources of stability and purpose, often describing how coaches, teachers, and senior pilots invested in him and how he in turn tries to be present for younger engineers and students. His public talks and NASA outreach work underscore that the Artemis program is not only about hardware but about who sees themselves in the story of spaceflight; by standing in front of classrooms and congregations in a flight suit that has been to deep space, he enlarges the imagined future of Black children and communities. For the archive, this is part of the record: the impact of Glover’s career is not only the missions flown but the re‑drawing of the possible. When a Black pilot is the one flying the spacecraft that returns humans to the Moon and lives for months keeping a space station running, it changes the reference points of the next generation. That change is itself an authored work, built by the choices and endurance of Glover and the people and institutions that supported him. ## Sources 1. “Victor J. Glover Jr.” NASA Biography, NASA, updated 2026. 2. “Victor Glover, Jr.” Encyclopaedia Britannica, Encyclopaedia Britannica, Inc., updated 2026. --- Cite as: Black's Encyclopedia, "Victor Glover and the Black road back to the Moon," revised July 11, 2026. https://www.blacksencyclopedia.com/record/victor-glover-and-the-black-road-back-to-the-moon Text under the Black's Record License: cite the record, keep attribution attached, cite the revision date.