The next astronauts to travel around the moon seem plenty fit to make the trip.
The four astronauts who will fly on NASA’s Artemis 2 mission recently passed the “Bobby and Pete Challenge,” performing 50 pull-ups and 100 pushups in less than 10 minutes.
The quartet — NASA’s Victor Glover, Christina Koch and Reid Wiseman, and Jeremy Hansen of the Canadian Space Agency — chronicled their achievement in a 50-second video, which NASA posted on X on Aug. 29.
The Bobby and Pete Challenge takes its name from Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, who popularized the viral fitness test in an Aug. 18 video.
Toward the end of that video, Kennedy passes the challenge along to Acting NASA Administrator Sean Duffy, who’s also the Secretary of Transportation, as well as a former champion lumberjack and reality TV star. And it was Duffy who got the Artemis 2 astronauts involved.
“Secretary Duffy, your Artemis 2 crew accepts the challenge,” Wiseman says at the beginning of the Aug. 29 X video, with his three crewmates joining on the final three words. (Wiseman is the Artemis 2 commander, Glover is the pilot, and Koch and Hansen are mission specialists.)
We then see clips of the four astronauts doing pushups and pull-ups, powering through the challenge sweaty and out of breath, but ultimately triumphant. And they end by paying the pain forward.
“We want Zena [Cardman], Mike [Fincke] and Jonny Kim on the International Space Station to compete and crush our times,” Wiseman says in the video, referring to the three NASA astronauts currently living on the ISS. (We don’t know what those times are; the video doesn’t give that information.)
As its name makes clear, Artemis 2 will be the second mission in NASA’s Artemis program of moon exploration. Artemis 1 launched in November 2022, successfully sending an uncrewed Orion capsule to lunar orbit and back to Earth.
The roughly 10-day Artemis 2 is expected to launch between February and April of 2026, sending Wiseman, Glover, Koch and Hansen on a slingshot trip around the moon. They won’t land on Earth’s nearest neighbor, but Artemis 3, targeted for 2027, will do so, if all goes to plan.
Fitness is a big part of the training regimen for all astronauts, whether they’re bound for Earth orbit, the moon or beyond. And the work continues off planet as well; astronauts living on the ISS exercise hard every day to stave off the bone loss and muscle wasting that long stays in microgravity induce.
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