NASA reported on Sept. 14, 2026, that its 2025 astronaut candidate class, introduced to the public on Sept. 22, 2025, from Johnson Space Center in Houston, is approximately halfway through a nearly two-year training program intended to prepare members for missions to low Earth orbit, the Moon and ultimately Mars. The agency said the class is on track to graduate in 2027, when members would join the active astronaut corps and await first flight assignments.

According to the report, training included geology classroom work at Johnson and field training in May at Rio Grande del Norte National Monument in New Mexico, plus July geology field training in Iceland involving several candidates alongside NASA astronauts and Artemis mission support teams. The candidates also flew on NASA's WB-57 aircraft and began flying T-38 jets, ran altitude chamber exercises, and practiced water survival in the Neutral Buoyancy Laboratory.

NASA added that the candidates were taking intensive Russian language and cross-cultural classes, learning spacecraft systems, conducting spacewalk training and learning emergency procedures and spacecraft maintenance and repair.