The Artemis II crew described the intense reentry and textbook splashdown in an interview with ABC’s David Muir, nearly a week after returning from their historic 10-day mission to the moon and back. The interview took place at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston, home of Mission Control.
“What people might not know is that reentry is at least 10 times wilder of an experience than any rocket launch,” mission specialist Christina Koch told Muir. She called reentry “the most phenomenal part, the grand finale of any space flight,” and added, “Coming back to a planet is no joke. It’s not like landing a plane.”
As Orion fell through Earth’s atmosphere, friction and compression created a plasma bubble that engulfed the spacecraft, producing a roughly six-minute communications blackout and subjecting the capsule to temperatures up to about 5,000 degrees Fahrenheit. Koch described seeing a flash from the plasma: “When that plasma comes it’s like nothing you can believe. The fireball that we were in got so bright that it was like an arc welder. You almost couldn’t even look at it.” She also said there was a rumbling during the descent that they could never have practiced on Earth.
Commander Reid Wiseman reassured the crew during reentry by saying, “Everything’s nominal,” a line Koch recalled thinking made her feel better even if he couldn’t be certain. Wiseman praised pilot Victor Glover’s composure and performance: “I want to tell you, this man is the real deal. We’re under four Gs for about 13 minutes, and the entire time he had a cadence of altitudes and speeds, and he never missed a beat. It was the most impressive operational experience I have been through watching him go through entry.”
Glover called the heat “literally and figuratively intense” and emphasized the importance of that cadence during the blackout. “In that blackout, not only do we lose the ability to communicate, we lose the ability for Mission Control to command to the vehicle,” he said. If something failed to happen automatically, the crew would need to intervene—ensuring the forward bay cover comes off and the drogue, pilot, and main parachutes deploy—so they had to be ready and on top of the timeline.
Glover described the splashdown as a “spiritual moment,” recalling that he thinks he said, “Welcome back to Earth.” Mission specialist Jeremy Hansen expressed deep gratitude when he saw the Orion capsule after the mission: “I just had, like, this immense feeling of gratitude for that ship, because it went through a lot and it kept four humans alive.”
The crew also reflected on an emotional moment from their journey that was captured on NASA’s livestream: Hansen proposing naming a lunar crater after Wiseman’s late wife, Carroll. “It’s the pinnacle of my entire life to be able to do something like that on this crew, to honor a woman who was so amazing, and the mother of my two daughters,” Wiseman told Muir. “It’s etched in my mind forever. I know for my two daughters, who had to watch their dad hurl himself around the moon with three of his best friends, that was a gift that can never be repaid.”