Artemis II astronauts still awed by moonshot experience: “It was otherworldly”

Nearly a week back from a voyage around the moon, the four Artemis II astronauts described an almost mystical experience flying over the normally unseen lunar far side, awed by their views of Earth a quarter of a million miles away and equally stunned watching a solar eclipse, they told reporters Thursday.  

“I want to thank the world for tuning in for a second and getting hooked on this mission,” commander Reid Wiseman said. “When we came home, we were shocked at the global outpouring of support, of pride, of ownership of this mission.”

“And really, that’s what the four of us wanted. We wanted to go out and try to do something that would bring the world together, to unite the world,” he said. “I will just wrap that all up with the astronaut’s creed, always launch as friends and land as friends.” 

Wiseman said the Artemis II crew launched as friends and landed as best friends. 

The astronauts blasted off from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida on April 1. Nine days later, the Orion capsule splashed down in the Pacific Ocean off the coast of San Diego, an epic ending to their historic mission.

Asked Thursday what was the most memorable event during a flight that carried them farther from Earth than any other humans and gave the crew a close-up look at the moon’s far side, Wiseman said he and his crewmates — pilot Victor Glover and mission specialists Christina Koch and Canadian astronaut Jeremy Hansen — had not yet had time to fully process the experience.

But it was powerful enough for him to ask the chaplain aboard the Navy recovery ship after splashdown in the Pacific Ocean to pay the crew a visit.

“I am not really a religious person, but there was no other avenue for me to explain anything or to experience anything, so I asked for the chaplain on the Navy ship to come visit us for a minute. I had never met him before in my life, but I saw the cross on his collar and I broke down in tears. It’s very hard to fully grasp what we just went through,” Wiseman said. 

Since splashing down off the Southern California coast on Friday, the crew has been subjected to “medical testing, physical testing, doctors, science objectives,” Wiseman said. “We have not had that decompression. We have not had that reflection time.”

But the event he mentioned as one of the most memorable to him was viewing a solar eclipse in deep space when the moon moved between the Orion crew ship and the sun, producing a ghostly glow all the way around the lunar horizon. 

“When the sun eclipsed behind the moon, I turned to Victor and I said I don’t think humanity has evolved to the point of being able to comprehend what we’re looking at right now. It was otherworldly, it was amazing,” he said.

Wiseman and his crewmates launched flew around the moon on April 6 and splashed down in the Pacific Ocean on April 10 to close out a voyage spanning nearly 700,000 miles.

For Hansen, the first Canadian to venture beyond low-Earth orbit, one of the more memorable aspects of flying in deep space was the three-dimensional appearance of the starry void, the moon and the Earth suspended in space close by. 

“What kept grabbing my attention when the lighting was right and we were looking out the window is that I kept seeing this, like, depth to, I guess, the galaxy,” he said. “It’s not that I could tell which stars were really closer and farther… but because of how bright they are and their differences, they look like you can tell where they are in 3D.”

“That was mind-blowing for me, and then you see the same thing with the moon and the Earth,” he said. “You’re viewing them from this new perspective with like three-dimensional depth. I’ve heard Christina talk about this a lot. We’re all kind of struck by these things that make us feel small, and that’s the sense I had.”

At the same time, Hansen said, he experienced “this very powerful feeling as a human being, like as a group. I saw it in all these sights over and over again. I kept seeing that same thing and (having) that same feeling.”

The Artemis II mission, NASA’s first piloted voyage to the moon since the last Apollo landing in 1972, was primarily a test flight of the agency’s Orion spacecraft, designed to carry astronauts to and from the moon, and an opportunity for flight controllers to hone their skills managing upcoming lunar landing missions.

After multiple delays, the astronauts were launched aboard an Orion capsule atop a Space Launch System rocket that put them into an elliptical orbit with a high point of more than 44,000 miles. They were the first to ride into space atop an SLS rocket, the most powerful operational booster in the world, and the first crew to fly in an Orion capsule.

It took 24 hours for the crew to complete one trip around the world in that highly elliptical orbit, giving them a full day to thoroughly test their Orion capsule’s life support, navigation and propulsion systems to make sure the ship was operating as required.

Then, as they reached the low point of the orbit at an altitude of just 115 miles, they fired the Orion’s service module engine for six minutes to break away from Earth and head for the moon.

The “free-return” trajectory was designed to carry the astronauts around the far side of the moon, using lunar gravity to bend their path back toward Earth without the need for any major thruster firings.

Four days after the trans-lunar injection engine firing, Wiseman and his crewmates reached a point in space 248,655 miles from Earth, the previous record for the farthest any human has flown into deep space.

That record was set in 1970 by the crew of Apollo 13 while making an emergency return to Earth. Shortly after passing behind the moon and out of contact with Earth, the Artemis II crew set their own record, reaching a distance of 252,756 miles before looping back toward Earth.

While flying some 4,000 miles above the moon’s far side, the astronauts were able to photograph and see with their own eyes a large swathe of the normally unseen terrain.

The crew was out of touch with mission control for 40 minutes. Ten minutes after regaining radio contact, they were able to witness an hour-long solar eclipse. 

From there, the astronauts headed home, slamming back into the atmosphere above the Pacific Ocean at a velocity of more than 24,000 mph. Thirteen minutes later, after their heat shield endured reentry temperatures of some 5,000 degrees, the spacecraft safely splashed down.

During an unpiloted test flight in 2022, an Orion capsule’s heat shield suffered unexpected damage. NASA said extensive testing and analyses showed the cause was related to the capsule’s so-called “skip” reentry trajectory that subjected the heat shield to alternating temperature extremes.

A different trajectory was used for the Artemis II reentry, and NASA officials said there were no obvious signs of any major damage. But engineers will not get a chance to thoroughly inspect the shield until after the Orion capsule is trucked back to the Kennedy Space Center.

From the crew’s perspective, their heat shield did just fine.

“We came in fast, and we came in hot, and I will tell you, that whole way in it was a smooth ride,” Wiseman said. “It was a very smooth ride.” 

He said both he and Glover noticed a “touch of char loss” during the descent, referring to small bits of the heat shield’s outer layer coming off and flying past the cockpit windows.

But all four crew members looked underneath the capsule after it was hauled inside the recovery ship and “it looked wonderful to us,” Wiseman said. “It looked great, and that ride in was really amazing.”

All four astronauts, none the 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.