April 11, 2026 / 8:08 PM EDT / CBS News
The four Artemis II astronauts — commander Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, Christina Koch and Canadian astronaut Jeremy Hansen — returned to NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston Saturday to cheers from family members and hundreds of space center workers after a historic trip around the moon.
The crew splashed down in the Pacific Ocean southwest of San Diego Friday evening to end a nine-day mission, the first piloted flight to the moon and back since the Apollo program half a century ago. After medical checks and calls home, they boarded a NASA jet and flew to Ellington Field near the space center, where a raucous crowd, including their families, awaited them in a hangar.
“After a brief 53-year intermission, the show goes on, and NASA is back in the business of sending astronauts to the moon and bringing them home safely,” NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman told the crowd. Turning to the crew he added, “Thank you for showing us the moon again. Thank you for showing us planet Earth again, and thank you for contributing to the greatest adventure in human history. Welcome home, Artemis II.”
Wiseman, joking with his crewmates, said he had “absolutely no idea what to say,” noting the abrupt shift from traveling at Mach 39 and seeing Earth out the window to standing back in Houston. Speaking with emotion, he reflected, “Before you launch, it feels like it’s the greatest dream on Earth. And when you’re out there, you just want to get back to your families and your friends. It’s a special thing to be a human, and it’s a special thing to be on planet Earth.”
Glover, who carried a Bible on the mission, said he wanted to publicly thank God at the start and again on Saturday. “Because even bigger than my challenge trying to describe what we went through, the gratitude of seeing what we saw, doing what we did and being with who I was with, it’s too big to just be in one body,” he said.
Koch described the striking view of Earth from near the moon: “When we saw tiny Earth, people asked our crew what impressions we had. And honestly, what struck me wasn’t necessarily just Earth, it was all the blackness around it. Earth was just this lifeboat hanging undisturbingly in the universe.” She added, “I know I haven’t learned everything that this journey has yet to teach me. But there’s one new thing I know, and that is planet Earth, you are a crew.”
Strapped into an Orion crew capsule they named Integrity, the astronauts launched from Kennedy Space Center on April 1 aboard NASA’s Space Launch System rocket — the most powerful operational rocket in the world — marking the first crewed flight in an Orion capsule. After a day in Earth orbit testing life-support and other systems, they fired the service module engine for a four-day flight to the moon.
Artemis II was NASA’s first piloted moonshot since Apollo 17 in 1972 and the opening of what NASA sees as a series of flights building toward a base near the lunar south pole. The mission’s goals were modest: a free-return trajectory around the moon that allowed the crew to observe nearly a quarter of the moon’s far side while illuminated by the sun.
During the flight they witnessed a spectacular solar eclipse from their perspective as the moon moved in front of the sun, producing a ghostly glow and halo that left the crew awestruck. “This continues to be unreal,” Glover told the Houston crowd. “The sun has gone behind the moon, and the corona is still visible, and it creates a halo almost around the entire moon…The Earth is so bright out there and the moon is just hanging in front of us, this black orb out in front of us. We can see stars and the planets behind it.”
Orion entered the moon’s sphere of influence early last Monday and flew around the far side roughly 14 hours later, passing within about 4,000 miles of the lunar surface at closest approach. The mission set a new record for the farthest distance from Earth ever reached by humans: 252,756 miles — about 4,100 miles farther than the Apollo 13 record set in 1970 during that crew’s emergency return.
The astronauts took thousands of photos, shot video and recorded observations to help researchers study how the human eye perceives lunar color and surface features. President Trump spoke to the crew by radio, saying the mission “paves the way for America’s return to the lunar surface very soon” and vowing a permanent presence on the moon and future missions to Mars.
Before launch, the science team identified a few relatively fresh craters that had not been named, and the crew proposed names, including one they wanted to name Carroll in memory of a loved one. “Integrity and Carroll Crater,” Canadian astronaut Jenni Gibbons confirmed from mission control.
At the welcome ceremony, Hansen said the mission demonstrated three essential ingredients of a successful crew: gratitude for the opportunity and the support of thousands; sharing the joy of the experience; and love. Calling his crewmates to him for a group hug, he said, “When you look up here, you’re not looking at us. We are a mirror reflecting you. And if you like what you see, then just look a little deeper. This is you.”
