The Artemis II astronauts, who recently completed a historic lunar flyby, offered high praise for their spacecraft, particularly its heat shield, following its performance during reentry.
In their first news conference since returning to Earth, the three American and one Canadian crew members affirmed that their mission significantly bolsters NASA’s ambitions for a crewed moon landing within two years and the eventual establishment of a lunar base.
Speaking from NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston, Commander Reid Wiseman, pilot Victor Glover, Christina Koch, and Canada’s Jeremy Hansen launched from Florida on April 1. This mission marked NASA’s first lunar crew in over half a century and its most diverse to date.
The quartet became the most distant human travelers ever, surpassing Apollo 13’s record, as they circumnavigated the lunar far side. From this vantage point, they observed features never before seen by the human eye, with the added spectacle of a total lunar eclipse.
Their Orion capsule, which they named Integrity, parachuted into the Pacific last Friday to close out the nearly 10-day voyage. Artemis II’s Houston homecoming the next day coincided with the 56th anniversary of the launch of Apollo 13.
Wiseman said he and Glover “maybe saw two moments of a touch of char loss” to the heat shield as Integrity plunged through the fastest, hottest part of reentry. Once aboard the recovery ship, they peered at the bottom of the capsule as best they could, leaning over to view any signs of damage. They spotted a little loss of charred material on the shoulder, where the heat shield meets the capsule.
“For four humans just looking at the heat shield, it looked wonderful to us. It looked great, and that ride in was really amazing,” Wiseman said.
He cautioned that detailed analyses still need to be conducted. “We are going to fine-tooth comb every single, not even every molecule, probably every atom on this heat shield,” he said.
The heat shield on the first Artemis test flight in 2022 — with no one aboard — came back so pockmarked and gouged that it pushed Artemis II back by months if not years. Instead of redoing it, NASA opted to change the capsule’s entry path to minimize heating. Future capsules will sport a new design.
As the parachutes released right before splashdown, Glover said he felt like he was in freefall — like diving backward off a skyscraper. “That’s what it felt like for five seconds,” he said, adding when the ride smoothed out: “It was glorious.”
Since their return, the four astronauts have endured round after round of medical testing to check their balance, vision, muscle strength and coordination, and overall health. They even put on spacewalking suits for exercises under conditions simulating the moon’s one-sixth gravity of Earth to see how much endurance and dexterity future moonwalkers might have upon lunar touchdown.
NASA is already working on Artemis III, the next step in its grand moon base-building plans. The platform from which the rocket launches headed back Thursday to Kennedy Space Center’s Vehicle Assembly Building, where it will be prepped for next year’s Artemis launch.
Still awaiting an assigned crew, Artemis III will remain in orbit around Earth as astronauts practice docking their Orion capsule with one or two lunar landers in development by Elon Musk’s SpaceX and Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin.
Artemis IV will follow in 2028 under NASA’s latest schedule, with two astronauts landing near the moon’s south pole.
NASA is aiming for a sustainable moon presence this time around. During the Apollo moonshots, astronauts kept their visits short. Twelve astronauts explored the lunar surface, beginning with Apollo 11’s Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin in 1969 and ending with Apollo 17’s Gene Cernan and Harrison Schmitt in 1972.
Koch said that since returning, she and her crewmates are “feeling even more excited and just ready to take that on as an agency.”
“We made it happen,” she added.
Everyone will need to accept extra risk to achieve all this and trust that any future problems can be figured out in real time, Hansen noted. “We’re not going to be able to pound everything flat before we go. We’re going to have to trust each other,” he said.
While everything went smoothly for them, “it was also very clear to us that it can get pretty bumpy,” he said. Future crews will have to “understand it can get real bumpy real fast.”
