After a successful voyage to the vicinity of the moon, members of the Artemis II mission reflected on their 10-day-long trip at an event on Saturday.
Speaking at Ellington Air Force Base in Texas, Reid Wiseman, the mission commander, expressed his gratitude at being back on Earth.
“Being 200,000 miles away from home. Before you launch, it seems like the greatest dream on earth. And, when you are out there, you just want to get back to your family and friends. It is a special thing to be a human, and it is a special thing to be part of the earth,” he said.
Wiseman added that he and his three crew members are now “forever bonded” before they all hugged.
Pilot Victor Glover as well as mission specialists Christina Koch and Jeremy Hansen spoke at the event, which was organised to welcome the crew members.
Fox News quoted Koch as saying, “What struck me wasn’t necessarily just Earth. It was all the blackness around it.” She also recalled the moment the crew glimpsed the planet from space, describing Earth as a “lifeboat” in a universe of blackness.
The Artemis II capsule and its four-member crew streaked through Earth’s atmosphere and safely splashed down in the Pacific Ocean on April 10 after nearly 10 days in space, capping the first voyage by humans to the vicinity of the moon in over half a century.
Nasa’s gumdrop-shaped Orion capsule, dubbed Integrity, parachuted gently into calm seas off the Southern California coast shortly after 5:07 p.m. Pacific Time, concluding a mission that four days prior took the astronauts 252,756 miles away from Earth, deeper into space than anyone had flown before.
The quartet blasted off from Cape Canaveral, Florida, on April 1 aboard NASA’s giant Space Launch System rocket, orbiting twice around Earth before sailing on for a rare journey around the far side of the moon.
In so doing, they became the first astronauts to fly around Earth’s only natural satellite since the Apollo program of the 1960s and 70s. Glover, Koch and Hansen also made history as the first Black astronaut, the first woman and first non-US citizen, respectively, to take part in a lunar mission.
NASA is seeking to achieve a crewed moon landing ahead of China, which is aiming to put its own crews there around 2030. The agency more broadly aims to establish a long-term lunar presence as a stepping stone to eventual human exploration of Mars.
(With inputs from Reuters)
