Victor Glover

Victor J. Glover Jr. was born on 30 April 1976 in Pomona, California. He earned a Bachelor of Science in general engineering from California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo, in 1999, then joined the U.S. Navy and became a naval aviator, flying and testing the F/A-18 Hornet, Super Hornet, and EA-18G Growler and logging thousands of flight hours, hundreds of carrier landings, and combat missions across deployments and test programs. A graduate test pilot who also earned master's degrees in flight-test engineering and systems engineering, Glover took an unusual detour before spaceflight, serving as a legislative fellow in the United States Senate—experience that broadened his sense of how exploration connects to public policy. NASA selected him as an astronaut in 2013, and he cites pioneering Black astronauts Guion Bluford, Ronald McNair, and Mae Jemison among his inspirations.

Glover has flown two missions. His first was SpaceX Crew-1, the first operational crewed flight of the Crew Dragon spacecraft Resilience, which launched on 15 November 2020. As pilot and then flight engineer for Expeditions 64 and 65, he spent 168 days aboard the ISS and conducted four spacewalks totaling roughly 26 hours, working on tasks that prepared the station's truss for new solar arrays and kept its external systems maintained. In doing so he became the first Black American astronaut to live aboard the International Space Station as a long-duration crew member—a milestone he reached more than two decades into the station's operational history. His second flight came in April 2026 as pilot of Artemis II, NASA's first crewed lunar mission since Apollo 17. Flying the Orion spacecraft on its roughly ten-day journey around the Moon and back, Glover became the first Black American astronaut to travel beyond low Earth orbit and into the vicinity of the Moon.

Those two firsts—first Black American long-duration ISS crew member and first Black American astronaut beyond low Earth orbit—place Glover at the center of a widening story about who gets to explore. A decorated Navy officer whose awards include the Defense Superior Service Medal and the NASA Spaceflight Medal, he is an active NASA astronaut and an outspoken advocate for diversity and inclusion in STEM, youth mentorship, and faith-based community work. He has described his ambition in terms of opening doors for a more diverse next generation of explorers and of moving humanity toward becoming a multi-planetary species, and his flight of Artemis II positions him among the astronauts most likely to shape NASA's return to the Moon in the years ahead.