GoKawiilHow do you recover from 10 days of traveling through outer space and around the moon? If you’re astronaut Christina Koch, you disconnect from being online and just journal.
“I spent that first week journaling about the mission without looking at any photos from the mission,” Koch told CNET on Monday during a visit to her alma mater, North Carolina State University, where an engineering building was being named after her. “I knew that, one day, the photos might define my memories, but initially, it was important to remember things as they were [with] fresh memories.”
Koch’s latest mission was NASA’s Artemis II, which sent her, commander Reid Wiseman, pilot Victor Glover and Canadian mission specialist Jeremy Hansen on a 10-day voyage in early April beyond the far side of the moon and back, becoming the first astronauts to go that distance in more than 50 years.
The NASA astronaut said she really “kept the blinders on” for the first two weeks. “The biggest fear I had when I landed was that I would forget it all so quickly.”
“The process of coming home is such an important one, whether you’ve done 328 days or nine days,” Koch said. She compared it to a kind of military deployment. “Reentering to Earth is a process, physical and mental. You’re coming back and, in some cases, coming into a routine [that] has gone ahead without you.”
Koch said she also came home to “quite a few” text messages, all congratulatory. But any emails she got from April 1 to April 10 are still unread; “I think people understand why,” she said with a laugh.
After a few weeks, Koch did look at the photos, and by then, the snaps were already world-famous. The photos the Artemis II team took — on off-the-shelf iPhones and Nikon cameras — came to be how the world experienced Artemis II. More than 18 million people tuned in to watch the crew’s takeoff, and their photos and live TV appearances spread in what became known as “Moon Joy.”
The Artemis II crew — (clockwise from left) Christina Koch, Jeremy Hansen, Reid Wiseman, and Victor Glover — take time out for a group hug inside the Orion spacecraft on their way home. NASA
It was a record-breaking trip. As a whole, the Artemis II crew broke Apollo 13’s record for the furthest space travel, traveling over 700,000 miles total. Koch became the first woman to go beyond low Earth orbit; Glover, the first Black person; and Hansen, the first Canadian.
Koch also holds the record for the longest-ever single spaceflight by a woman from her 2019 stint on the International Space Station, as well as taking part in the first all-female space walk.
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