NASA is offering people around the world the opportunity to “be a part” of a historic space mission: to send their names into space aboard the Artemis II spacecraft, which will fly around the Moon and return to Earth next year.
NASA invites people around the world to symbolically participate in the Artemis II mission, through the “Send Your Name with Artemis II” campaign, valid until January 21, through which anyone can send their name to the moon.
The “Send Your Name with Artemis II” campaign is open free of charge to anyone who wishes to enter their name to be included on a digital memory card that will be carried by the mission crew around Earth’s natural satellite. Participants who register their names will receive a personalized “boarding pass”, a digital certificate symbolically marking their participation in this space adventure.
Anyone can participate in this campaign, regardless of age or nationality, the only condition being to sign up by January 21, to be part of this symbolic list, which will travel by spaceship.
The sign-up process is simple and free: participants go to NASA’s official page, fill in their name, an email address and other basic information, then download their personal “boarding” pass as a digital souvenir.
What is the Artemis II mission
Artemis II is the first manned mission in the Artemis program to orbit the Moon, more than 50 years after the last manned flights. The ship will be launched no later than April 2026 and will have four astronauts on board, three Americans and a specialist from the Canadian Space Agency.
For about 10 days, the crew will test the spacecraft’s systems and make a flyby under the far side of the Moon before returning to Earth.
Send your name campaigns are not new to NASA. For example, for the uncrewed Artemis I mission, which orbited the Moon in 2022, the agency collected millions of names that were integrated into the flight manifest and then brought back to Earth with the Orion spacecraft upon return.
Thus, there were other opportunities to travel, symbolically, in space:
* “Message in a Bottle”: for the Europa Clipper mission to Jupiter’s icy moon Europa, NASA invited people to sign a special poem, engraved on a microchip traveling to the Jupiter system. More than 2.6 million people from all over the world participated in this campaign, and their names will go billions of kilometers in space.
* “Send Your Name Mars”:
for the Perseverance Rover mission, NASA collected nearly 11 million names that were engraved on microchips and sent to the surface of Mars.
* “Send Your Name with VIPER”: for the VIPER rover, which will explore the Lunar South Pole, NASA also invited people around the world to submit their names.
Such initiatives serve not only as a souvenir for participants, but also as a means of engaging the public in space exploration and promoting interest in science and technology, a stated goal of the Artemis program.
For those who have already signed up or plan to do so for Artemis II, NASA provides a PIN code that allows verification or download of the pass even after registration, provided that code is kept.
Even if it is a symbolic act, the opportunity to have one’s name included in a space mission is considered by many to be a unique experience – a “personal” mark in a historic event of space exploration, which marks the return of humans near the Moon and, in the long term, the preparation for manned flights to Mars.
