Houston: Four astronauts traveling back to Earth from the far side of the moon on NASA's Artemis II mission spoke of their emotions as they wrapped up the unprecedented flight and prepared to re-enter the atmosphere in a "fireball", during their first press conference from space on Wednesday. The Artemis II crew, flying in their Orion capsule since launching from Florida last week, are due to splash down off the Southern California coast on Friday evening after reaching the moon earlier this week. They cruised along a path that took them past the shadowed, lunar far side to become the farthest-flying humans in history.
On the trip back home, they will reach speeds of up to 23,839 mph (38,365 kph) as they enter Earth's atmosphere, a high-risk phase of the mission that will put Orion's heatshield to the test as it gets battered by intense atmospheric friction.
"I've actually been thinking about entry since April 3, 2023 when we got assigned to this mission," said Artemis II mission pilot Victor Glover, when asked how he was feeling about the return.
"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."
Lunar race to beat China mission
Glover and fellow NASA astronauts Reid Wiseman and Christina Koch, and Canadian astronaut Jeremy Hansen are the first wave of astronauts in a multibillion-dollar series of missions under the Artemis program that aims to return humans to the moon's surface by 2028 before China, and establish a long-term U.S. presence over the next decade, building a moon base for potential future missions to Mars. Koch cast the mission series as a relay race, telling reporters: "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," she said.
That next mission, Artemis III, will involve a docking test in low-Earth orbit between the Orion capsule and both astronaut lunar landers that NASA plans to use to put its astronauts on the moon in later missions.
Artemis IV, targeted for 2028, would be the program's first crewed lunar landing, and the first since Apollo 17 in 1972.
Back on Earth, dozens of lunar scientists have been packed in rooms adjacent to NASA's Mission Control Center in Houston this week, scribbling down notes and debating a steady stream of both real-time and recorded audio from the Artemis II astronaut crew in their Orion spacecraft.
Splashdown off San Diego
The crew is due to return to Earth on Friday around 8 p.m. ET (0000 GMT Saturday), splashing down off the coast of San Diego, California to cap their nearly 10-day mission.
The four astronauts on Monday had reached a record-breaking distance from Earth of roughly 252,000 miles, surpassing by some 4,000 miles the previous record held by the Apollo 13 crew for 56 years.
Wiseman, Artemis II mission commander, told reporters the crew each had two "very brief" chats with their families during the mission.
"Hearing your crew mates giggling and crying, and just gasping and listening and loving their families from afar - familiy is so important to all four of us, and that has been amazing," he said.
In a radio message to mission control in Houston on Monday, as the crew approached their closest distance to the lunar surface, Hansen suggested naming a fresh crater on the moon in honor of Wiseman's late wife, Carroll, who died of cancer in 2020.
Wiseman told reporters his crewmates approached him with that idea to name the crater Carroll while they were in quarantine before launching to space.
"That was an emotional moment for me," Wiseman said. "I said 'Absolutely, I would love that' ... but I can't give the speech. I can't give the talk."
Tear-jerking moment
In the mission's sixth day, Hansen choked up as he made the suggestion to mission control in what was a tear-jerking moment for many NASA staff in Houston.
The astronauts broke their distance record during the lunar flyby in which they surveyed the moon's surface from roughly 4,000 miles above.
Advances in lunar science have typically relied on lunar-orbiting satellites and Earth-based observations. But the crew's six-hour lunar flyby provided a real-time stream of scientific collections from human eyes, allowing rare back-and-forth discussions between teams on the ground and their fellow scientists over 252,000 miles away in deep space.
Scientists see NASA's Artemis II mission as an important early step in unlocking mysteries about the solar system's formation. The moon, Artemis II mission specialist Koch said before launching to space last week, is a "witness plate" to the formation of our solar system.