Artemis II Commander Praises 'Magnificent Machine'

The Artemis II astronauts who ignited a lunar renaissance gave high marks Thursday to their moonship, especially the heat shield, for its performance during reentry. In their first news conference since returning to Earth, the three Americans and one Canadian said their lunar flyby puts NASA in a much better position for a moon landing by a crew in two years and an eventual moon base, the AP reports. "Thank you to every single person that had a hand in building that machine, because it was a magnificent machine," Commander Reid Wiseman said.

• "We wanted to go out and try to do something that would bring the world together, to unite the world," Wiseman said, per the BBC. "We were certainly hooked on this mission, but when we came home, we were shocked at the global outpouring of support, of pride, of ownership of this mission," he said. "We want to thank the world. Thank you for tuning in."

• Wiseman, pilot Victor Glover, Christina Koch, and Canada's Jeremy Hansen launched to the moon from Florida on April 1, NASA's first lunar crew in more than a half-century. They became the most distant travelers ever—breaking Apollo 13's record—as they whipped around the lunar far side, illuminated enough to reveal features never viewed before by the human eye. The sight of a total lunar eclipse added to the wonderment.
• "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 were looking at right now,' because it was otherworldly," Wiseman said, per NBC News. He said he's "not really a religious person," but the experience was so moving that he asked for the chaplain on the recovery ship after they splashed down last Friday and "broke down in tears."
• 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. "I will say it was just a very intense moment, because we had never seen or felt this before," Glover said. "Everything was important, every noise, every mechanism."
• Glover said that as the parachutes released right before splashdown, he 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."
• Wiseman said they had come so close to the lunar surface that if there had been a capsule, "at least three of my crewmates would have been in it, trying to land on the moon," the BBC reports. "It is not the leap I thought it was," he said. "Once we're around the moon, in the vacuum of space, we've got a vehicle that's handling great. If you had given us two keys to the lander, we would have taken it down and landed on that moon."

• The captain said that naming a crater on the moon after his late wife was the crew's idea and they told him about it before launch. "I thought it was the most beautiful thing I'd heard in my entire life," he said. "She was an amazing human being, and she's the mother of my two daughters. And what man on this planet deserves a gift like that, to have your crew be so thoughtful and to do something so caring and so deep and so meaningful."
• Wiseman later told the AP that he's been so busy since getting back that he hasn't had time to gaze up at the moon, let alone Carroll Crater,
• "Being 252,000 miles away from home was the most majestic, gorgeous thing that human eyes will ever witness," he said. But hurtling back through the atmosphere at 39 times the speed of sound, "that is scary and that is risky." That's why he yearned for home midway through his flight. "You just want to hold your kids and you just want them to know that you're safe."