The four astronauts aboard the Artemis II mission’s Orion spacecraft spoke to the press from space for the first time since completing a lunar flyby that took them a record distance from Earth.
After becoming the first humans to directly observe the Moon’s far side, emotions are high as the crew prepares to reenter Earth’s atmosphere and splash down Friday in the Pacific Ocean off the California coast.
“Human minds should not go through what these just went through,” said NASA’s Artemis II commander Reid Wiseman. “We have a lot that we just need to think about and journal and write, and then we’ll get the full feeling of what we just went through.” He added that witnessing a solar eclipse from space had a deep impact on him: “I’m actually in chills right now just thinking about it, my palms are sweating.”
The crew’s one Canadian member, mission specialist Jeremy Hansen, said he saw things “I just had never even imagined” while passing around the Moon’s far side. “We live on a fragile planet in the vacuum and the void of space.”
On Monday the crew reached roughly 252,000 miles (400,000 kilometers) from Earth, breaking a 56-year-old record held by Apollo 13.
Mission pilot Victor Glover said he had not “even begun to process what we’ve been through,” and was preparing for reentry. “There’s so many more pictures, so many more stories … We’ve still got two more days, and riding a fireball through the atmosphere is profound as well.” During reentry the Orion spacecraft will reach speeds up to 23,839 mph (38,365 kph) and endure intense heating from atmospheric friction. “I’ve actually been thinking about entry since April 3, 2023 when we got assigned to this mission,” Glover said when asked about the return.
Mission specialist Christina Koch, who previously set the record for the longest single spaceflight by a woman at 328 days, said the crew had developed a strong sense of camaraderie. “I will miss being this close with this many people and having a common purpose, a common mission, getting to work on it hard every day across hundreds of thousands of miles with a team on the ground,” she said. Though conditions in the capsule were sometimes uncomfortable, Koch said that discomfort is part of pushing the limits of human space exploration: “We can’t explore deeper unless we are doing a few things that are inconvenient, unless we’re making a few sacrifices, unless we’re taking a few risks.”
The Artemis II mission is the first in a multibillion-dollar series aiming to return humans to the lunar surface by 2028 and eventually establish a U.S. moon base as a step toward potential crewed missions to Mars.
Edited by: Elizabeth Schumacher