Nearly a week after their Orion capsule splashed down in the Pacific, the four Artemis II astronauts are still sounding a little stunned—like the experience is still catching up with them.
Commander Reid Wiseman said the voyage around the moon delivered an almost mystical kind of perspective: flying over the lunar far side, looking back at Earth a quarter of a million miles away, and watching a solar eclipse unfold in deep space. “I want to thank the world for tuning in for a second and getting hooked on this mission,” Wiseman said Thursday, adding that when they got home the crew was “shocked at the global outpouring of support, of pride, of ownership of this mission.” He framed the mission as something meant to bring people together, saying the crew wanted to “go out and try to do something that would bring the world together.”
The timing matters, because Wiseman also admitted they haven’t had much room yet to absorb what they went through. He said the astronauts had been pulled into a pipeline of “medical testing, physical testing, doctors, science objectives,” and that there hasn’t been a chance for the “decompression” and reflection time that might help the moment land. Asked what was most memorable, he said he and his crewmates—pilot Victor Glover and mission specialists Christina Koch and
Canadian astronaut Jeremy Hansen—had not fully processed the experience either. Still, he described asking for a chaplain aboard the Navy recovery ship to visit the crew after splashdown, and the explanation was simple: “I am not really a religious person,” Wiseman said, “but there was no other avenue for me to explain anything… so I asked for the chaplain on the Navy ship to come visit us for a minute.” He said he had never
met him before, but “I saw the cross on his collar and I broke down in tears.”
The astronauts’ biggest emotional standout, though, came from a solar eclipse they witnessed while in deep space—when the moon moved between the Orion crew ship and the sun, creating a ghostly glow around the lunar horizon. Wiseman said he turned to Victor and told him he didn’t think humanity had evolved enough to comprehend what they were looking at. “It was otherworldly, it was amazing,” he said. You could almost picture it from the way he talked about it, even if you weren’t there. Somewhere in that moment, it seemed like the mission stopped being a checklist and became something quieter.
Hansen, the first Canadian to venture beyond low-Earth orbit, described another detail that kept grabbing his attention: the way stars, the galaxy’s “depth,” the moon, and Earth all appeared with three-dimensional character. He said that when the lighting was right and he looked out the window, the bright stars’ differences made it seem as though they had measurable distance in space. “That was mind-blowing for me,” he said, then added that seeing the same thing with the moon and Earth made the whole view feel new—like “three-dimensional depth.” He said he and the other astronauts kept circling back to that sensation of feeling small as they watched the universe from so far out.
The mission itself began with a launch from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida on April 1, then nine days later ended with the Orion capsule splashing down in the Pacific Ocean off the coast of San Diego—closing out a trip that spanned nearly 700,000 miles. After multiple delays, the astronauts lifted aboard Orion atop a Space Launch System rocket, into an elliptical orbit with a high point of more than 44,000 miles. They completed one full trip around the world in that orbit over 24 hours to test Orion’s life support, navigation, and propulsion systems before breaking away from Earth with a six-minute engine burn. From there, the free-return trajectory was designed to carry them around the moon’s far side using lunar gravity to bend their path back without major thruster firings.
There were also the practical edge-of-space details—like the distances they set along the way. Four days after the trans-lunar injection engine firing, Wiseman and his crewmates reached a point 248,655 miles from Earth, then later set their own farthest-then mark as they passed behind the moon and out of contact with Earth, reaching 252,756 miles. They were out of touch with mission control for 40 minutes, and then, about ten minutes after regaining radio contact, they watched an hour-long solar eclipse. Coming home, they hit the atmosphere above the Pacific Ocean at a velocity of more than 24,000 mph. Thirteen minutes later, after heat shield temperatures of some 5,000 degrees, the capsule splashed down safely.
Even reentry, which carried concern because of a 2022 unpiloted heat shield incident involving a “skip” trajectory, was described as smooth from the crew’s perspective. Wiseman said they came in “fast” and “hot” and that “whole way in it was a smooth ride.” He said both he and Glover noticed a “touch of char loss” during descent—small bits of the heat shield’s outer layer coming off and passing by the cockpit windows—but after the capsule
was hauled inside the recovery ship, he said it “looked wonderful” underneath. Afterward, all four astronauts, none worse for nine days in weightlessness, flew back to their homes in Houston the day after splashdown, landing at Ellington Field near the Johnson Space Center on Saturday afternoon to cheers and applause from family members and hundreds of space center workers who gathered to welcome them home. And maybe that’s the part that makes the whole thing
feel real—the moment when you hear people cheering, and you can smell engine fuel and warm metal near the tarmac, while the last sounds of space are still in your head.
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