Six days after splashing down in the Pacific Ocean following humanity’s first journey to the vicinity of the Moon in more than half a century, the four astronauts of NASA’s Artemis II mission faced the press at Johnson Space Center in Houston on Thursday — arriving not just as returning explorers, but as something rarer still: a crew visibly changed by what they had seen.
Commander Reid Wiseman, pilot Victor Glover, mission specialist Christina Koch, and Canadian Space Agency astronaut Jeremy Hansen fielded questions on everything from the terror of re-entry to the silence of deep space — and offered the world its most detailed window yet into what it felt like to travel 252,756 miles from Earth.
‘The Grand Finale’: Re-entry Through a Plasma Fireball
The moment that dominated Thursday’s press conference — and a separate sit-down interview with ABC News anchor David Muir — was the thirteen harrowing minutes of atmospheric re-entry on April 10.
“What people might not know is that re-entry is at least ten times wilder of an experience than any rocket launch,” Koch told reporters. “It is the most phenomenal part, the grand finale of any spaceflight. Coming back to a planet is no joke. It’s not like landing a plane.”
As the Orion capsule screamed into Earth’s atmosphere at 25,000 miles per hour, friction and compression built a plasma bubble around the ship, cutting off all communications with Mission Control for six minutes. Inside, temperatures on the heat shield climbed to 5,000 degrees Fahrenheit.
“When that plasma comes, it’s like nothing you can believe,” Koch said. “The fireball that we were in got so bright that it was like an arc welder. You almost couldn’t even look at it.” She recalled a deep rumbling that no simulation on Earth had prepared them for. As the shaking intensified, Wiseman called out to his crew: “Everything’s nominal.” Koch admitted her reaction was instant and involuntary: “I thought to myself, he has no idea if this is nominal — but I’m glad he just said that, because I feel better now.”
Wiseman reserved his highest praise for Glover, who held the pilot’s chair through all of it. “I want to tell you, this man is the real deal,” Wiseman said. “We’re under four Gs for about thirteen minutes, and the entire time he had a cadence of altitudes and speeds, and he never missed a beat. It was the most impressive operational experience I have been through watching him go through entry.”
Glover, characteristically measured, described the heat as “literally and figuratively intense,” and explained why the constant readout of numbers was not ritual but necessity: “In that blackout, not only do we lose the ability to communicate, we lose the ability for Mission Control to command to the vehicle. If something were to go wrong, we had to be on it.” He called the moment of splashdown, when the parachutes opened and the capsule hit the water, “a spiritual moment.” His words to his crew were simple: “Welcome back to Earth.”
Hansen, for his part, said his first instinct after egress was gratitude — not to the mission, not to NASA, but to the ship itself. “I just had this immense feeling of gratitude for that spacecraft, because it went through a lot, and it kept four humans alive.”
‘Otherworldly’: Looking Back at Earth from Deep Space
Beyond the mechanics of survival, the crew returned repeatedly to what it felt like to look back at their home planet from a quarter-million miles away — and to admit that human language may not yet be adequate to the task.
“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,” Wiseman told reporters, “because it was otherworldly, and it was amazing.”
On flight day six, the crew flew around the far side of the Moon — the side no unaided human eyes had ever seen directly. They documented the terrain along the lunar terminator, where long shadows cast by low-angle sunlight mirror the conditions near the Moon’s south pole, where Artemis IV aims to land in 2028. They proposed names for two craters and reported meteoroid impact flashes on the lunar night side.
The crew also conducted a fifteen-minute ship-to-ship video call with the crew of the International Space Station — two teams of humans, one orbiting Earth, the other circling the Moon — exchanging observations across the void.
A Crater for Carroll: The Mission’s Most Personal Moment
Among the most closely watched moments of the entire ten-day flight was a quiet exchange captured on NASA’s livestream. As Orion curved around the Moon, Hansen announced to the world — and to Wiseman — that the crew wanted to propose naming a lunar crater after the commander’s late wife, Carroll Wiseman.
“It’s the pinnacle of my entire life to be able to do something like that on this crew, to honor a woman who was so amazing, and the mother of my two daughters,” Wiseman said on Thursday, his voice steady but low. “It’s etched in my mind forever.” He described being moved to tears during the mission’s earlier deep-space call with his daughters — the bond made all the more acute by the vast and indifferent darkness on the other side of Orion’s windows.
‘Bonded Forever’: The Making of a Crew
The press conference opened with Wiseman speaking directly to his three crewmates. “What an amazing journey that was,” he began. “We are bonded forever. That’s the closest four humans can be and not be a family.” Then, to the assembled reporters and cameras: “I am here to tell the world — we launched as friends, and we came back as best friends.”
Koch described learning what it truly means to be part of a crew — the private sacrifices, the mutual grace, the listening. “Hearing your crewmates giggling and crying and gasping and loving their families from afar,” she said, had been the most remarkable bonding experience of her career, surpassing even her record-setting 328-day stay on the International Space Station. “Space sleep,” she added, drawing laughter, “is the best sleep ever.”
Hansen, who became the first non-American to travel beyond low Earth orbit, said what struck him most on returning to Earth was discovering how deeply the global public had taken ownership of the mission. “I found it really refreshing to find out how people followed the mission and been creative with it,” he said. “And it just reinforces something I already knew — humans are just great people in general. We don’t always do great things. We’re not always in our integrity. But our default is to be good, and to be good to one another.”
Eyes Already on Artemis III — and the Moon’s Surface
With the crew still in post-flight medical reconditioning, the conversation moved quickly to what comes next. Wiseman left no ambiguity about the readiness of the hardware: “My own personal opinion — they could put the Artemis III Orion on the Space Launch System tomorrow and launch it, and the crew would be in great shape. This vehicle really handled very well.”
He went further. “If we had a first flight lander on board that thing, I know at least three of my crewmates would have been in it, trying to land on the Moon.”
Koch said the mission had deepened the entire crew’s hunger for the surface. “We were very much lifted up by the notion that we would get to contribute to astronauts doing this all over again, much sooner than we thought,” she said. “We are feeling even more excited and just ready to take that on as an agency.”
Hansen urged both NASA and the world to embrace a higher tolerance for uncertainty as lunar surface operations draw closer. “We have to be willing to accept a little more risk than we were willing to accept in the past, and to just trust that we will figure it out in real time,” he said. “We’re not going to be able to pound everything flat before we go. We’re going to have to trust each other, and crews, and Mission Control, to work through real problems.”
NASA continues to target early 2028 for the first crewed lunar landing, designated Artemis IV following the restructuring of the programme earlier this year. Artemis III, now scheduled for 2027, will test commercial lunar landers in low Earth orbit.
‘Go Do Hard Things’
Asked what wisdom they carried back from 252,756 miles away, each astronaut offered a note addressed as much to the next generation as to the present one.
Wiseman: “You have to go do really hard, really challenging things, and you have to go move the needle. Our hands and our minds have got to be engaged.”
Glover: “Get really comfortable asking questions — and then listening. To your peers, but also your mentors.”
Koch: “Find your fulfilment. Do what scares you. Support those around you.”
Hansen: “Don’t do it alone. Share what you’re trying to accomplish with others, because you need their support to do big things. Be brave enough to share your goals.”
The Artemis II mission launched April 1, 2026, and splashed down April 10 after a 694,481-mile journey. The crew is undergoing standard post-flight reconditioning at Johnson Space Center. NASA’s heat shield inspection of the Orion crew module continues at Kennedy Space Center in Florida.
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