GoKawiilHOUSTON—Their mission is complete. The four people who flew beyond the Moon on NASA’s Artemis II mission are back home in Houston with their families. But the lessons from Artemis II are just beginning to be told.
There are tangible, objective takeaways from the nine-day mission. How did NASA’s Space Launch System rocket perform? Nearly perfectly. Was the Orion spacecraft up to the job of flying to the Moon and back? Absolutely. Will engineers need to make any changes before the next Artemis mission? Yes, and that’s not terribly surprising for a program that, 20 years in, has just flown a crew to space for the first time.
Ars has covered the technical lessons from Artemis II, such as hydrogen leaks on the launch pad, helium leaks in space, and a toilet that wasn’t always available for No. 1.
But there’s something else that must be said. NASA struck gold when it selected the astronauts to fly on the Artemis II mission. NASA’s opaque formula for picking space crews worked three years ago when Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, Christina Koch, and Jeremy Hansen strode across the stage inside Hangar 135 at Ellington Field. It was there that the agency held an extravagant event to announce the crew for Artemis II, complete with VIPs, spotlights, and an elaborate stage setting flanked by a supersonic jet trainer.
Three years and eight days later, Wiseman, Glover, Koch, and Hansen returned to Hangar 135 on Saturday afternoon with the same enthusiasm and excitement. But they arrived with an entirely different perspective, having wrapped up their circumlunar journey less than 24 hours earlier.
NASA again set the stage to welcome the Artemis II astronauts back to their home base in Houston. The scene wasn’t quite as glossy as NASA’s crew announcement in 2023, and it didn’t need to be. This event had more gravitas. NASA let the achievement make the noise.