GoKawiilOn the home stretch of their nine-day mission, the four astronauts flying aboard NASA’s Orion spacecraft are just beginning to reflect on their experience of flying beyond the Moon.
Their memories of Monday’s encounter with the Moon are still fresh as they return to Earth, heading for reentry and splashdown in the Pacific Ocean on Friday evening.
“I’m actually getting chills right now just thinking about it. My palms are sweating,” said Reid Wiseman, commander of the Artemis II mission. “But it is amazing to watch your home planet disappear behind the Moon. You can see the atmosphere. You could actually see the terrain on the Moon projected across the Earth as the Earth was eclipsing behind the Moon. It was just an unbelievable sight, and then it was gone. It was out of sight.”
Flying more than a quarter-million miles from home, father than any humans in history, the astronauts flew into a radio blackout for 40 minutes. Out of contact with Earth, the crew continued snapping pictures and shared a batch of maple cookies supplied by Canadian astronaut Jeremy Hansen, the first person not from the United States to ever travel to deep space.
“We took about three or four minutes, just as a crew, to really reflect on where we were, and then it was right back into the science,” Wiseman told reporters in a long-distance press conference Wednesday night. “We still haven’t even begun to reflect on this mission. We had a little bit of a light work day yesterday, and we were starting to journal and reflect a little bit. And there’s a lot that our brains have to process. Human minds should not go through what these just went through, and it is a true gift.”
Soon after reaching their closest point to the Moon, some 4,000 miles away, the astronauts flew into the shadow of the Moon. For Victor Glover, pilot of Artemis II, this was one of the “greatest gifts” of the mission.