Victor Glover is a former US Navy fighter pilot and test pilot who was selected as a Nasa astronaut in 2013. He served as pilot of Nasa’s SpaceX Crew 1 mission and spent nearly six months on the International Space Station as part of Expedition 64. Born in Pomona, California, he is married with four children and is set to become the first black person to travel to the Moon.
Those who know him say he is the most charismatic of the quartet and the most sharply dressed, with designer brown leather boots that somehow look good even with an orange flight suit. His call sign, “IKE”, is reputedly short for “I Know Everything”, a nod to his three master’s degrees in flight test engineering, systems engineering and military operational art and science.
At a red carpet event in 2023, in New York, he looked every inch the modern astronaut celebrity, alongside his wife Dionna.
Preparing for Artemis II, Glover has been working through original Gemini and Apollo journal papers from the 1960s, hunting for engineering and piloting lessons that might still apply. Between the graphs and equations, he says, you glimpse the people behind the missions; what their families were going through, what they knew and did not yet know as they pushed into the unknown.
“Pushing ourselves to explore is core to who we are,” he says. “It is part of being human… We go out to explore, to learn where we are, why we are, understanding the big questions about our place in the universe.”
Glover has said he will take with him a Bible, his wedding rings and family heirlooms, along with a collection of inspirational quotations compiled by Apollo 9 astronaut Rusty Schweickart.
