Heading back into orbit: Miami Sunset High graduate is spacebound again

A man with ties to South Florida will travel to outer space. Again.

On Tuesday, NASA announced its four astronauts for its Artemis III mission. The crew includes Dr. Francisco “Frank” Rubio, 49, a graduate of Miami Sunset Senior High School in Miami-Dade County.

Rubio, selected as a mission specialist, will join three other men on NASA’s Orion spacecraft next year. The mission will test docking procedures with lunar landers developed by Blue Origin and SpaceX. It will be a critical step in NASA’s goal to land on the moon’s lunar south pole in 2028.

It won’t be Rubio’s first time in space, though, or his longest.

Rubio stayed in space for 371 days after the Russian aircraft meant to take him from the International Space Station back to Earth sprang a coolant leak. What was supposed to be a six-month mission turned into over a year, with Rubio setting the record for the longest single spaceflight by an American astronaut in the process. He returned home in 2023.

After graduating from high school in Miami in 1994, he attended the United States Military Academy in West Point, New York, and became a Black Hawk helicopter pilot, and later, a physician and flight surgeon.

In 2017, his friend told him to apply to NASA’s new Artemis program, which hopes to land humans on the moon for the first time since 1972.

He was chosen out of 18,000 applicants to become one of 12 astronauts in the pilot program and graduated three years later in 2020 to officially become an astronaut.

“The ability to go to space is amazing,” Rubio told the Miami Herald at his astronaut graduation ceremony in 2020. “It’s something that seems out of reach as a child.”

Joining Rubio aboard the mission is Andre Douglas, 40, who was born in Miami but grew up in Chesapeake, Virginia. The other two who will be on board are Randy Bresnik and the European Space Agency’s Luca Parmitano.

The four will begin training immediately on the Orion spacecraft.