HOUSTON — The Marine Corps fighter pilot who once led combat missions over Baghdad and dodged surface-to-air missiles is now preparing to command humanity’s return to the lunar surface, a mission that will place him at the helm of the most ambitious spaceflight since the Apollo era.
Col. Randy “Komrade” Bresnik, a 56-year-old veteran of two spaceflights and multiple combat deployments, has been named the commander of Artemis III, the mission that will land the first astronauts near the lunar south pole. The announcement, made official during a ceremony at Johnson Space Center, cements Bresnik’s place in history as the first Marine to command a Moon landing mission.
His path to this moment, however, was forged not in the sterile confines of a simulator but in the chaos of war, the crucible of test pilot school, and the profound isolation of a spacewalk where the only thing between his boots and the Earth was 250 miles of nothing.
“It is the most physically and mentally demanding aspect of space flight because you’re wearing what is a 300-pound suit,” Bresnik said in an exclusive interview, describing the visceral reality of extravehicular activity. “You have everything tethered to you because if you let go, it’s going to float off. But when you’re coming out of that airlock for the first time and it’s the airlock’s on the bottom of the space station.
And so I’m hanging out there and there’s just nothing underneath me anymore.”
Bresnik’s journey to the launch pad began in Fort Knox, Kentucky, but his identity was shaped by the California sun and a family legacy of service that stretches back through generations of American conflict. Two weeks after his birth, his parents drove him and his older sister across the country so his mother could be with family as his father deployed to Vietnam. His father, a helicopter pilot with the First Air Cavalry, flew UH-1 “Huey” gunships during the initial buildup in 1964, received the first battlefield promotion of the Vietnam War, and returned for a second tour before leaving as a first lieutenant.
The aviation gene, however, ran even deeper. Bresnik’s grandfather served as Amelia Earhart’s personal photographer for five years, and was scheduled to accompany her on her ill-fated around-the-world flight in 1937.
“He was actually supposed to be with her on that mission photograph documenting the mission around the world,” Bresnik recounted, his voice carrying the weight of that near-miss with history. “And his photographic equipment and he were a bit too heavy and she decided to trade them for fuel on her aircraft instead. And so, only because of that is why I’m here today.”
That legacy of near-misses and narrow escapes would come to define Bresnik’s own career. A scholarship from the Marine Corps sent him to The Citadel, the military college in South Carolina, where he arrived as a skinny kid from Southern California who had never been east of the Mississippi. The institution, he said, prepared him for the rigors of command in ways he couldn’t have anticipated.
After graduation, he chose the Marine Corps over the Army, a decision he frames with characteristic wit: “I simply figure every generation has to improve on the previous one. He was a helicopter, I became a jet pilot. He was in the Army, I was in the Marine Corps.”
The transition to aviation wasn’t guaranteed. Bresnik worried throughout flight school that he might wash out, that his desire to fly might not match his aptitude. But growing up riding motorcycles gave him an intuitive understanding of bank angles, power, and speed that translated seamlessly to the cockpit.
He went on to fly 86 different aircraft, with the F/A-18 Hornet emerging as his platform of choice. He attended Top Gun, the Navy’s elite fighter weapons school, and later became a test pilot at Patuxent River, Maryland, where he evaluated aircraft from around the world, including becoming one of the first Americans to fly the French Mirage 2000D.
The morning of September 11, 2001, found Bresnik at Patuxent River, an instructor at the Test Pilot School. It was his birthday. He watched the second plane hit the World Trade Center from a television in the hallway, and within hours, he had grabbed his flight gear and reported to the test squadron, flying combat air patrol over the Chesapeake Bay in the days that followed.
The world had changed, and so had his trajectory.
In January 2003, Bresnik deployed to Al Jaber Air Base in Kuwait, flying combat air patrols for Operation Southern Watch before the invasion of Iraq. When the war kicked off in March, he flew armed reconnaissance and close air support missions, conducting battlefield interdiction that allowed the 1st Marine Division to punch through a dozen Iraqi divisions on its drive to Baghdad. He faced small arms fire and surface-to-air missiles, executing evasive maneuvers that had become instinct after years of training.
“You do all this training for years and then have some call, ‘Hey, there’s missiles in the air,’” Bresnik said. “And you’re popping flares and breaking out plane to try and have the missile glom off onto your flares. You train like you’re going to fight, and it becomes instinct.”
It was from the desert of Iraq that Bresnik submitted his application to NASA, filling out the paperwork in the sandbox and sending it into the void. He returned from combat in May 2003, got engaged on the Fourth of July, and informed his then-fiancée Rebecca that he had applied for a job at Johnson Space Center. “It’ll never happen,” he told her.
That fall, he was called for an interview. He was selected as part of the “Exploration Class” of 2004, the first class chosen after the Columbia disaster.
His first day at NASA was surreal. He met his classmates at a hotel in Washington, D. C.
, where Eileen Collins and the STS-114 Return to Flight crew were gathered for the 35th anniversary of Apollo 11. Inside the green room at the Air and Space Museum, he found himself talking with Gene Cernan, Buzz Aldrin, Neil Armstrong, Alan Bean, and Jack Schmitt. The legends of lunar exploration were eager to hear about his experiences flying F-18s in combat, and he was equally eager to absorb their wisdom.
It was a passing of the torch, and Bresnik knew he had big shoes to fill.
His first spaceflight, STS-129 aboard the space shuttle Atlantis in November 2009, was a masterclass in compartmentalization. Assigned to deliver spare parts and equipment to the International Space Station, Bresnik was also about to become a father for the second time. His wife, Rebecca, was induced to deliver their daughter while he was in orbit.
She went into labor on the day before his first spacewalk, and remained in labor throughout the six-and-a-half-hour excursion. He emerged from the airlock expecting to hear that his daughter had been born. She hadn’t.
“At that point I know I’m in trouble,” Bresnik recalled. “I’ve missed the birth and, oh by the way, she’s been in labor for a day and a half.”
He woke in the middle of the night during a satellite pass and called down to the delivery room. He heard the sights and sounds of childbirth over the phone for the remainder of the pass before the connection was lost. The next morning, Houston played “Butterfly Kisses” by Bob Carlisle over the radio.
His daughter, Abigail, had been born. He saw pictures and video-conferenced with his wife, then immediately floated into the airlock to depressurize for his second spacewalk, which he was leading.
“How do you do that?” he was asked. “I know you have to, but how do you actually do that?”
“It’s one of those things that the military does a good job of allowing you to compartmentalize,” Bresnik said. “Can you imagine our World War II vets, their foxhole buddy gets shot. They still have to do their job to defend their sector of the front lines.
It’s sad that we have to do that as humans, but it’s something that we just have to do at times.”
The spacewalk itself was a test of nerve. Emerging from the airlock on the bottom of the space station, Bresnik initially felt as though he was in the Neutral Buoyancy Lab, the giant swimming pool used for training. But then the sun came up, and he saw the Earth for the first time from outside a spacecraft.
“Oh Lord, what a heavenly sight,” he said, before the reality of his situation set in. He was 250 miles above the planet, traveling at 17,500 miles per hour, with nothing between his boots and the Earth except his boots.
“You can imagine if we all went up to the top of the Washington Monument and went over and put our toes on the edge and all lean over,” Bresnik said. “You can imagine that physical sensation that you’d have, your body’s saying, ‘Hey, back up.’ Imagine that times 10,000 when you’re out there.”
A veteran astronaut, Rex Walheim, had given him a crucial piece of advice: put on your waist tethers and push off. Bresnik did, and when the tethers reached their limit and pulled him back toward the structure, he realized he wasn’t falling. He was floating at the same rate as the space station.
The instant relaxation of that realization saved his energy for the work ahead, a lesson he now passes on to the next generation of spacewalkers.
Bresnik’s second spaceflight came in 2016, when he launched aboard a Russian Soyuz spacecraft to the International Space Station. The contrast with the space shuttle was stark. The shuttle was a Cadillac, a limousine with room to move.
The Soyuz was a Volkswagen Beetle, with three grown adults in spacesuits crammed into the front seat, knees bent and touching the legs of the person next to them. All radio calls were in Russian. The ride was what he called “economy minus.”
“You’d never complain about sitting in the back of the plane anymore no matter how small the plane,” Bresnik said. “That’s why you see astronauts and cosmonauts so excited and happy the day they launch. It’s not the fact that they’re launching, it’s that I get strapped in that seat one more time for launch and then I have to get back in it one more time to come back for landing.
I never have to get in that seat again.”
Now, Bresnik is looking at a different seat entirely. For the past five years, he has led the astronaut office’s exploration efforts, everything that leaves low Earth orbit. He has been the lead person using his test pilot experience to develop new spacecraft, from the Space Launch System rocket to the Orion capsule to the Gateway space station that will orbit the Moon.
He has worked with SpaceX and Blue Origin on the Human Landing System, the lunar landers that will carry astronauts from Gateway to the surface.
“It is an amazing time to be part of the space program,” Bresnik said. “We’ve talked about going back to the moon for a very long time and finally, we’re doing it. We’re not just a country of powerpoint vehicles anymore.”
Artemis III will be the first crewed lunar landing since Apollo 17 in 1972. The mission will target the lunar south pole, a region of permanent shadow and potential water ice that could be used for fuel and life support. Bresnik and his crew will spend approximately a week on the surface, conducting science experiments and testing technologies that will eventually take humans to Mars.
“We will prove out the technologies on the moon that’ll be able to take us to Mars,” Bresnik said. “Not just stopping at the moon and starting with our nearest heavenly neighbor. By the 2030s, we are going to Mars.”
The commander’s call sign, “Komrade,” was earned on his first flight in the F-18, when his instructor, a Marine captain with the call sign “Yoda,” decided that Bresnik sounded like Brezhnev. Thirty-one years later, he hasn’t done anything stupid enough to change it. But the call sign belies a career defined by precision, discipline, and an almost preternatural ability to focus under pressure.
As he prepares for the most dangerous mission of his life, Bresnik carries with him the lessons of his father, who flew helicopters in Vietnam; his grandfather, who almost died with Amelia Earhart; and the Marines he flew alongside in Iraq. He carries the memory of watching the Columbia disaster unfold from a diverted flight deck in Maine, and the knowledge that he is part of a lineage of explorers who have pushed the boundaries of human achievement.
“I was born in Fort Knox, Kentucky, and about 2 weeks after I was born, my parents hopped in the car and drove me and my older sister to Southern California so that my mom could be there with my dad’s parents as he headed off to Vietnam,” Bresnik said. That journey, from a Kentucky army base to the lunar south pole, is a testament to the American spirit of exploration and the unbreakable bonds of family and service.
The Artemis III mission is currently scheduled for launch no earlier than September 2026, though that date could slip depending on the readiness of the Space Launch System and the Orion spacecraft. Bresnik and his crew have already begun training, including simulated lunar surface operations in the deserts of Arizona and underwater spacewalk training in the Neutral Buoyancy Lab. The crew will spend weeks in quarantine before launch, a period of isolation that Bresnik says he welcomes.
“I never got good sleep until I went into quarantine before the flight,” he said, recalling his first mission.
The stakes could not be higher. A failure on Artemis III would not only be a personal tragedy for Bresnik and his crew but a devastating blow to NASA’s Artemis program and the nation’s ambitions to return to the Moon. The mission will test new spacesuits, new landing systems, and new operational concepts that have never been tried in the harsh environment of the lunar south pole.
But Bresnik, who has faced surface-to-air missiles, the birth of his daughter from orbit, and the terror of his first spacewalk, is not daunted. He has spent his entire life preparing for moments like this, from the motorcycle tracks of Southern California to the cockpit of an F-18 over Baghdad to the vacuum of space.
“It’s certainly the most physically and mentally demanding aspect of space flight,” he said of spacewalking, a skill he will need on the lunar surface. “But when you’re out there and you look down and there’s nothing between you and the Earth except for your boots, that’s a whole different feeling.”
That feeling will be amplified exponentially when Bresnik looks down from the lunar surface and sees the entire Earth, a blue marble hanging in the blackness of space. He will be standing on a world where no human has stood in over half a century, leading a crew that will write the next chapter of human exploration.
“I’ve been fortunate to lead the astronaut office’s efforts in everything that leaves lower Earth orbit,” Bresnik said. “To be a part of that and contribute is certainly a very satisfying and enjoyable opportunity. And to be able to use my experience from the Marine Corps and as a test pilot to bring that to fruition is just a very fortunate opportunity.”
The Marine Corps has a saying: “The few, the proud.” Randy Bresnik is among the few humans who have walked in space, and soon he will be among the even fewer who have walked on the Moon. His journey from the battlefields of Iraq to the command seat of Artemis III is a story of resilience, duty, and the relentless pursuit of a dream that began with a skinny kid in Southern California who just wanted to fly.
As he prepares to make history, Bresnik remains grounded in the values that brought him here. He speaks of his family with the same reverence he speaks of his crew, and he speaks of his country with the same devotion he speaks of his God. He is a Marine, a father, a test pilot, and now, a lunar commander.
And when he finally steps onto the surface of the Moon, he will carry with him the spirit of every American who ever looked up at the night sky and wondered what lies beyond.
“It is the most physically and mentally demanding aspect of space flight,” he said, returning to the subject of the spacewalk. “But it is also the most rewarding. When you’re out there, you’re not just representing yourself.
You’re representing everyone who made it possible for you to be there.”
The Artemis III mission will be Bresnik’s final spaceflight, he has said, a capstone to a career that has already spanned decades and continents. But his legacy will extend far beyond his own accomplishments. He is training the next generation of astronauts, passing on the lessons he learned from Rex Walheim and the Apollo veterans, ensuring that the flame of exploration continues to burn bright.
“We have people that have climbed Mount Everest, we have people that are concert pianists,” Bresnik said of the astronaut corps. “For me, it was riding motorcycles and working on cars and rebuilding an old house. Those were things that were different.
And it’s amazing how much the working on cars and fixing old houses applies to space flight, especially when you’re doing spacewalks.”
That mechanical understanding, honed in garages and on construction sites, will serve him well on the lunar surface, where the ability to troubleshoot and improvise could mean the difference between life and death. The Moon is a harsh mistress, with temperatures ranging from hundreds of degrees below zero in the shadows to hundreds of degrees above zero in the sunlight. The south pole, in particular, presents unique challenges, with its rugged terrain and permanently shadowed craters.
But Bresnik is undaunted. He has faced worse odds. He has flown through missile fire, walked in the void of space, and watched his daughter be born from 250 miles above the Earth.
The Moon, he says, is just the next step.
“We will prove out the technologies on the moon that’ll be able to take us to Mars,” he said. “By the 2030s, we are going to Mars.”
The journey to that red planet will begin with a single step on the gray dust of the lunar south pole. And when that step is taken, it will be taken by a Marine from Fort Knox, Kentucky, who never stopped believing that the sky was not the limit.