The four Artemis II astronauts—fresh off a nine-day trip around the Moon—flew back to NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston on Saturday, arriving to cheers, applause, and a familiar kind of commotion you only really get at a spaceport. Families were there, space center workers packed in too, and the moment felt bigger than the schedule.
They splashed down in the Pacific Ocean southwest of San Diego on 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.
NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman told the cheering group, “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.” Then, turning toward the crew, he added, “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.” It was one of those moments where the words land, even if you can’t quite pin down why—maybe it was the volume of people, or the way engines and uniforms seem to blend together in your senses.
Commander Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, Christina Koch and Canadian astronaut Jeremy Hansen had spent the last stretch pushing Orion through deep-space conditions that sound almost unreal from Earth. Wiseman joked with his crewmates before speaking himself: “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.” His voice shifted into something more personal as he described the emotional swing from launch day to return. “Before you launch, it feels like it’s the greatest dream on Earth,” he said. “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, who carried a Bible with him to the moon, said he wanted to thank God in public when the mission began—and did so again Saturday. “And I want to thank God again,” he told the crowd. “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 leaned into a different kind of awe: seeing Earth suspended in the deep black of space from a distance of a quarter of a million miles away. “When we saw tiny Earth, people asked our crew what impressions we had,” she said. “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.”
The flight itself, in broad strokes, followed a path designed to test spacecraft systems and gather observations—not to land, at least not yet. 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. After 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 for a four-day flight to the moon. Artemis II 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 mission’s goals were modest on paper, but the details were not. Artemis II swung around the Moon on a free-return trajectory, 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 enjoyed 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.
Orion entered the moon’s gravitational sphere of influence early last Monday and flew around the dark side about 14 hours later, passing within about 4,000 miles of the lunar surface. Moments later, the crew 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. They snapped thousands of photos during their
pass, shot video, and recorded personal observations based on the color sensitivity of the human eye.
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 Hansen proposed a second feature they wanted to call “Carroll,” explaining that their loved one’s name was Carroll, the spouse of Reid, the mother of Katey and Ellie. Canadian astronaut Jenni Gibbons in mission control confirmed: “Integrity and Carroll Crater.” At the welcome home ceremony, Hansen
closed by laying out three essential ingredients he said made the mission work: gratitude, sharing joy, and love. “The last one is love,” he said, calling the other astronauts in for a group hug. “What you saw was a group of people who loved contributing and extracting joy out of that,” Hansen added. Then, with that mirror-like twist, he told the crowd: “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.” And honestly, that’s how it kind of felt—like the real payload wasn’t only the capsule, but the idea of coming back safely, again, and again.
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