The four Artemis II astronauts, freshly back from a historic trip around the moon, flew back to NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston Saturday to cheers and applause from family members and hundreds of space center workers who gathered to welcome them home.
Artemis II commander Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, Christina Koch and Canadian astronaut Jeremy Hansen splashed down in the Pacific Ocean southwest of San Diego Friday evening to close out a nine-day mission, the first piloted flight to the moon and back since the end of the Apollo program a half century ago.
After medical checks and phone calls home to family and friends, all four boarded a NASA jet and flew back to Ellington Field a few miles from the space center. A raucous crowd awaited them in a nearby hangar, including the crew’s families.
“After a brief 53-year intermission, the show goes on, and NASA is back in the business of sending astronauts to the moon and bringing them home safely,” NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman told the cheering crowd.
Turning to the astronauts, he said, “Thank you for showing us the moon again. Thank you for showing us planet Earth again, and thank you for contributing to the greatest adventure in human history. Welcome home, Artemis II.”
Wiseman stood up and after joking with his crewmates, said “I have absolutely no idea what to say. Twenty-four hours ago, the Earth was…out the window and we were doing mach 39 (times the speed of sound), and here we are back at Ellington at home.”
Speaking with clear emotion, he said “before you launch, it feels like it’s the greatest dream on Earth. And when you’re out there, you just want to get back to your families and your friends. It’s a special thing to be a human, and it’s a special thing to be on planet Earth.”
Glover, a deeply spiritual man who carried a Bible with him to the moon, said that when the mission started he wanted thank God in public.
“And I want to thank God again,” he said Saturday. “Because even bigger than my challenge trying to describe what we went through, the gratitude of seeing what we saw, doing what we did and being with who I was with, it’s too big to just be in one body.”
Koch was equally moved by the experience of seeing Earth, suspended in the deep black of space, from the vantage point of the moon a quarter of a million miles away.
“When we saw tiny Earth, people asked our crew what impressions we had,” she told the crowd. “And honestly, what struck me wasn’t necessarily just Earth, it was all the blackness around it. Earth was just this lifeboat hanging undisturbingly in the universe.
“I know I haven’t learned everything that this journey has yet to teach me. But there’s one new thing I know, and that is planet Earth, you are a crew.”
Strapped into an Orion crew capsule they named “Integrity,” the astronauts blasted off from the Kennedy Space Center on April 1 atop a Space Launch System rocket. They were the first to ride into space aboard the world’s most powerful operational rocket, and the first to fly in an Orion capsule.
After spending a full day in Earth orbit checking out the Orion spacecraft’s life support and other systems, they fired the capsule’s service module engine to break away from Earth for a four-day flight to the moon.
It was NASA’s first piloted moonshot since the final Apollo moon landing mission in 1972, and the first of what NASA envisions as a steady stream of flights while building a base near the lunar south pole.
The Artemis II mission had more modest goals, simply swinging around the moon on a free-return trajectory back to Earth, giving Wiseman and his crewmates an unprecedented opportunity to observe nearly a quarter of the moon’s far side while it was illuminated by the sun.
They also were able to enjoy a spectacular solar eclipse when the moon moved in front of the sun from the crew’s perspective, creating a ghostly glow around the darkened moon, an ethereal sight that left the crew awestruck.
“This continues to be unreal,” Glover told Houston. “The sun has gone behind the moon, and the corona is still visible, and it’s bright, and it creates a halo almost around the entire moon…The Earth is so bright out there and the moon is just hanging in front of us, this black orb out in front of us. We can see stars and the planets behind it.”
The Orion capsule entered the moon’s gravitational sphere of influence early last Monday and flew around the dark side of the moon about 14 hours later, passing within about 4,000 miles of the lunar surface at close approach.
Moments later, they set a new record for the maximum distance anyone has ever flown from planet Earth — 252,756 miles — about 4,100 miles farther than a record set in 1970 by the crew of the ill-fated Apollo 13 mission during their emergency return to Earth.
The astronauts snapped thousands of photos during their historic pass around the moon, shot video and recorded their personal observations to give researchers insights based on the color sensitivity of the human eye.
“Your mission paves the way for America’s return to the lunar surface very soon,” President Trump radioed the astronauts. “We’re going all out. We’ll plant our flag once again, and this time we won’t just leave footprints. We’ll establish a permanent presence on the moon, and we’ll push on to Mars. That’ll be very exciting.”
Before launch, the science team helped identify a few relatively fresh craters that had not been previously named. The crew proposed the name of their spacecraft for one.
“And the second one, especially meaningful for this crew, is a number of years ago, we…lost a loved one,” Hansen said. “And there’s a feature in a really neat place on the moon. And it is on the near-side/far-side boundary…And some times of the moon’s transit around Earth we will be able to see this. So we lost a loved one, her name was Carroll, the spouse of Reid, the mother of Katey and Ellie…It’s a bright spot on the moon. And we would like to call it Carroll.”
“Integrity and Carroll Crater,” Canadian astronaut Jenni Gibbons replied from mission control. “Loud and clear. Thank you.”
At the welcome home ceremony Saturday, Hansen spoke last, saying the mission showed him a successful crew had three essential ingredients. The first is gratitude for the opportunity and the support of thousands who made the flight possible. The second was sharing the joy of the experience.
Then he called Wiseman, Glover and Koch to him for a group hug, adding, “The last one is love.”
“What you saw was a group of people who loved contributing and extracting joy out of that,” Hansen said. “And what we’ve been hearing is that was something special for you to witness. And the reason I had them form up here with me is because I would suggest to you that when you look up here, you’re not looking at us. We are a mirror reflecting you. And if you like what you see, then just look a little deeper. This is you.”
