No kid from Pomona has ever gone so far.
“Pushing ourselves to explore is just core to who we are,” Victor Glover said in an April 2023 NASA video. “It’s part of being a human. We want to know what’s out there, just beyond the horizon.”
Navy Commander Glover graduated from Ontario High School in 1994. He’s scheduled to pilot NASA’s Artemis II mission, which is scheduled to launch on Wednesday, April 1. The four-person crew will be the first to return to the moon in almost 54 years, after the departure of Apollo 17 in December 1972.
An Inland Empire launchpad
The dream of spaceflight started early for Glover.
“When I was a kid, you know, I saw the space shuttle go up, and I wanted to fly the space shuttle,” he said in a 2013 interview with the Inland Valley Daily Bulletin after he was named an astronaut candidate. “But I also wanted to be a stuntman, a policeman like my father, president.”
By the time he attended Ontario High School, Glover was already aiming high, according to Pamela Larde. She was friends with Glover at Ontario High and later at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo. They remain friends today.
“He always talked about becoming president and an astronaut,” she said.
This isn’t typical high school behavior, but Glover and his friends weren’t worried about that.
“We were so unconcerned about what people thought, if we talked a little nerdy, or had our very silly dreams,” Larde said. “We were very unbothered by that.”
And the idea that becoming astronaut — or president — was too hard, wasn’t the way Glover and his friends thought.
“I don’t think it ever crossed our minds that it was too big to be done,” Larde said. “I never heard him flinch or hesitate.”
Gregg Givens both taught and coached Glover in the early 1990s. Although Glover also played varsity football, Givens remembers him best as an “outstanding” wrestler who finished sixth in the state in 1994 in his weight class. But more than that, Givens remembers him as a young man who knew where he was going.
“He followed his own drummer,” Givens said. “He didn’t follow the crowd. He did what he wanted to do, hung out with who he wanted to hang out with.”
Similarly, English teacher Judy Jackson remembers Glover as “a bright, outgoing student with a friendly smile.”
Oscar Balderrama was a year older than Glover. The two were workout partners on Ontario High’s wrestling team.
“He was a really hard worker, good attitude, didn’t complain, friendly,” Balderrama said. “People listened to him; he was a born leader.”
And while he found Glover impressive at the time, he couldn’t have predicted how far his former teammate would go.
“You never know who’s going to do what, going forward,” Balderrama said. “It really does blow your mind to see.”
The Artemis II mission
In 2013, Glover hoped to get a chance to man the International Space Station. Since then, he’s spent more than six months aboard the ISS across two missions and he’s taken part in four spacewalks.
The Artemis II crew will only orbit the moon — landing on the surface is planned for later. But their mission will help NASA gain data they need to plan for future moon landings — and beyond.
“The most exciting aspect of this mission for me is the exploration we’re doing is the first few steps on the path to getting humans to Mars,” Glover said in 2023. “And I don’t think that can be overstated.
Glover, the pilot, will be the second in command on the four-person mission.
“These are folks who have a ton of experience in space but also on the ground and I know them all very well and I’m looking forward to this journey with them,” Glover said in 2023.
A father of four, Glover is well aware of the danger of what he’s doing. Seventeen NASA astronauts have died during training or while on missions.
“His mission in going there is coming back home,” Larde said, quoting Glover. “There is a concern and an acknowledgement that it’s very, very dangerous, but he doesn’t focus on that.”
He and his family are used to him doing dangerous work.
“There are two things I distinctly remember were more dangerous than flying on the space station for six months,” Glover said in 2013. “One of them was being on the ground in Iraq, for soldiers and Marines, and also flying off of an aircraft carrier, which is what I do.”
Twenty-four people have been to the moon before Artemis II’s upcoming orbit, with half of them setting foot on the moon. More than a fifth of them have been Californians:
- William Anders, who orbited the moon 10 times in the Apollo 8 mission in 1968, graduated from Grossmont High School in El Cajon. Anders is perhaps best known for taking the famous Earthrise photo of a blue Earth rising above the gray lunar horizon.
- The first person on the moon, Apollo 11’s Neil Armstrong, got a masters degree in Aerospace Engineering at USC.
- Apollo 12’s Pete Conrad, the third person to walk on the moon, died in Ojai in 1999.
- The ninth person to walk on the moon, Apollo 16’s John Watts Young, was born in San Francisco in 1930.
- His crewmate, Apollo 12’s Richard F. Gordon, orbited the moon 45 times as the pilot of the mission’s command module, died in San Marcos in 2017.
Artemis II will be a mission of firsts. Glover will be the first person of color to go to the moon. His Artemis II crewmate, Mission Specialist Christina Koch, will be the first woman to go to the moon. Mission Specialist Jeremy Hansen, a Canadian, will be the first non-American to go to the moon.
Glover is aware of the significance of being the first Black person to go to the moon, said Larde — a Black woman herself — but doesn’t want that to overshadow the rest of the Artemis II mission.
“He absolutely recognizes it, honors it, has deep pride and respect that he’s the one doing that, but he also doesn’t want people to get lost in the (focus on) it,” she said.
To the moon … and beyond?
Once the Artemis II crew orbits the moon and returns to Earth, there are still more worlds for Glover to conquer.
In late February, NASA administrator Jared Isaacman said he’d like to see Artemis IV land on the moon in 2028, 60 years after Neil Armstrong first set foot there. The lunar landing would be followed by the establishment of a permanent moon base.
Glover has said he hopes to one day work on the lunar surface. But even if that never happens, he’s already achieved one of his two big childhood dreams.
“So we’re waiting for president because, you know, it hasn’t been checked off yet,” Larde laughed. She’s been invited to watch the Artemis II launch in person at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida on Wednesday.
There is an established space-to-Capitol Hill pipeline. Mercury astronaut John Glenn, the first American to orbit the Earth and the third in space, later served four terms in the U.S. Senate for 25 years. He also sought the Democratic Party presidential nomination in 1984, losing out to Walter Mondale.
And when Glover got the call in 2013 that he had been selected as an astronaut candidate, he was working as a Navy Legislative Fellow in the office of Senator — and former Republican presidential candidate — John McCain on Capitol Hill.
“After what he’s done, I could absolutely see him becoming the president,” Givens said.
Larde agrees, and thinks he’s the kind of person many Americans would love to have as their leader.
“I think he’s well on his way,” she said.
“To the people in his immediate life, we get to know someone who’s completely loyal. Loyal to family, loyal to friends and just a good person to be around. We don’t get to see a lot of that in the spotlight,” Larde continued.
“What we see behind closed doors is a true man of integrity. And I’m grateful to get to know someone like that.”
Balderrama intends to watch the launch back home in Southern California, which is currently scheduled for April 1 at 3:24 p.m. Pacific time.
“When you tell your kids that they can do anything you want, Victor’s that example,” he said. “He was a smart kid, but he took it to the next level.”
More about astronaut Victor Glover
- Astronaut candidate from Pomona hopes to someday man space station
- Pomona resident chosen as astronaut for historic NASA missions on spacecraft by SpaceX and Boeing
- Pomona-born astronaut answers students’ questions from orbiting space station
- History-making Ingenuity cheered by outer-space ‘neighbor,’ astronaut Victor Glover
- Pomona native Victor Glover, his NASA-SpaceX crewmates reflect on 6 months at space station
- SpaceX/NASA astronauts, including Pomona’s Victor Glover, splash down safely off Florida
- History-making astronaut – and hometown hero – Victor Glover to lead Pomona Christmas parade
- NASA Capt. Victor Glover returns to Ontario High to share his journey
- NASA clears its Artemis moon rocket for an April launch with four astronauts following repairs
- Artemis II astronauts arrive at Kennedy Space Center ahead of next week’s launch