Artemis crew returns to Earth with ‘all the good things’ from Moon discoveries
The Artemis II crew said they have “many more photos” and “many more stories” to share with the world as they prepare to return to Earth.
The four astronauts aboard the Orion spacecraft have completed their mission around the Moon and are expected to land off the coast of San Diego on Friday around 8:00 p.m. US EST (00:00 GMT).
Speaking to the media from space their way homemission pilot Victor Glover said the crew was eager to share what they saw with the world.
It was the first the team had heard since their historic lunar flyby which saw them travel further from Earth than any other humans.
Asked at Wednesday night’s conference about reentry to Earth, Glover responded: “We have to go back. There’s so much data that you’ve already seen, but all the good things are coming back with us.”
“There are so many more photos, so many more stories,” he said.
Glover added that the crew still had “two days” before they could begin to process what they had experienced.
“I’m going to think and talk about all these things for the rest of my life,” he said.
The Artemis II mission’s spacecraft, Orion, broke the human travel record at around 1:56 p.m. EDT (6:56 p.m. BST) on Monday, breaking a record of 248,655 miles (400,000 km) held since 1970 by the Apollo 13 mission.
The spacecraft had not planned to land on the Moon, but fly around its hidden facethe side that is never visible from Earth. Satellites have already photographed the Farside, but astronauts were the first human eyes to see parts of the Farside’s surface, its vast craters and lava plains.
Right after the flyby, President Trump spoke with the Orion team and congratulated them: “Today you made history and made all of America truly proud, incredibly proud.”
During the final virtual press conference, at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston, the four astronauts teleported live again as a microphone hovered between them.
They each took turns answering journalists’ questions with considerable delay.
The crew was interviewed by the Los Angeles Times about the 40 minutes of “profound solitude” during which they lost contact with Earth.
Commander Reid Wiseman said the crew had a lot of scientific work to do and these were “probably the most critical lunar observations for our geology team.”
“But the four of us took a moment, we shared the maple cookies that Jeremy had brought, and we took about three or four minutes, as a crew, to really think about where we were,” he said.
For Glover, the “greatest gift” of the mission was seeing the lunar eclipse beyond the far side of the Moon.
For Wiseman, the “highlight moment” was when his team named a lunar crater in honor of Wiseman’s late wife, Carroll, who died of cancer in 2020.
“I think when Jeremy spelled Carroll’s name…I think for me, that’s when I was overcome with emotion and I looked over and Christina was crying,” Reid said.
“Just for me personally, that was kind of the culmination of the mission,” he continued.
The crew also said that they get their sources of information about planet Earth from their family members.
They “have been our source on how the mission went from the public’s perspective,” Wiseman said, before adding “obviously they’re all biased.”
Asked by Rebecca Morelle, editor of News Science at the BBC, what the crew will miss most in space, Christina Koch said she would miss the “camaraderie”.
On what she won’t miss, Koch said there’s nothing.
“We can’t explore deeper unless we do some things that aren’t right for us, unless we make some sacrifices, unless we take some risks. And all of those things are worth it,” she said.
The crew now faces several calmer days of checks and experiments before a final ordeal: a fiery dive through the atmosphere at nearly 25,000 mph and a parachute landing in the Pacific that will test the capsule’s heat shield and recovery systems.
