NASA
Midway through their lunar observation period, the Artemis II crew members – Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, Christina Koch, and Jeremy Hansen – pause to turn the camera around for a selfie inside the Orion spacecraft.
The four astronauts on the Artemis II mission called a news conference to discuss their journey around the moon and back. Journalists asked them questions from 178,000 miles away.
The crew members — Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, Christina Koch and Jeremy Hansen — answered questions from the Orion spacecraft Wednesday night while in the midst of their return journey back to Earth. Though they’ve held public affairs events on NASA’s livestream of the mission, it was their first moment to share with reporters about their experience on the historic lunar mission.
“What we really hoped in our soul is that we could, for just a moment, have the world pause and remember that this is a beautiful planet in a very special place in our universe, and we should all cherish what we have, what we have been gifted,” Wiseman said. “And I think for the folks that decided to tune in— and it sounds like it was quite a few — this has happened, and for that, we are eternally grateful.”
Sign up for the Hello, Houston! daily newsletter to get local reports like this delivered directly to your inbox.
Wiseman also spoke about what he felt in the moments leading up to Hansen of the Canadian Space Agency propose naming a lunar crater after Wiseman’s late wife, Carroll, who worked as a school nurse in the Houston area. He told reporters the other three astronauts made the suggestion while they were quarantined in Florida prior to the mission.
“I think when Jeremy spelled Carroll’s name, C-A-R-R-O-L-L, I think for me, that’s when I was overwhelmed with emotion,” he said. “We all pretty much broke down right there. And just for me personally, that was kind of the pinnacle moment of the mission for me. That was, I think, where the four of us were the most forged, the most bonded, and we came out of that really focused on that day ahead.”
RELATED: See photos from the moon after Artemis II’s historic lunar flyby
Each of the crew members spoke to the wholly unique experience of seeing the moon up close, as they did on Monday. Still, Hansen said the experience did not radically alter his perception of human existence.
“I have to say, it hasn’t changed my perspective or the perspective that I launched with,” he said. “The perspective I launched with was that we live on a fragile planet in the vacuum, in the void of space. We know this from science. We’re very fortunate to live on planet Earth.”
They also spoke to their camaraderie and the bond they forged in the mission. Koch stated that she wanted to pass that message on to the future Artemis mission crews, including ones who will aim to land on the moon in the Artemis IV mission.
“This is a relay race,” she said. “In fact, we have batons that we bought to symbolize physically, that we plan to hand them to the next crew. And every single thing that we do is with them in mind. Oftentimes, it’s actually easier in human space flight, especially on a first mission, to accept some of the things that aren’t working quite right, or the operational work-arounds. And we have actually been diligent to try to fix everything. And we’re always thinking from the perspective, what is the next crew going to think about this? How will this help them to succeed?”
The crew members are in their final days of the mission, with a projected splashdown off the coast of San Diego on Friday evening. The process of entering the Earth’s atmosphere is a complicated one as the spacecraft will be moving at several miles per second and heat up into the thousands of degrees. But the splashdown on Earth is a moment Glover said he’s thought of since the very beginning.
“I’ll be honest and say I’ve actually been thinking about entry since April 3, 2023, when we got assigned to this mission,” he said. “There’s so much data that you’ve seen already, but all the good stuff is coming back with us. There’s so many more pictures, so many more stories, and, gosh, I haven’t even begun to process what we’ve been through. We’ve still got two more days, and riding a fireball through the atmosphere is profound as well.”