The four-person Artemis II crew — commander Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, Christina Koch and Canadian astronaut Jeremy Hansen — arrived at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston on Saturday to cheers from families and hundreds of space center staff following a landmark trip around the moon.
The astronauts had splashed down in the Pacific Ocean southwest of San Diego on Friday evening, concluding a nine-day mission: the first piloted flight to the moon and back since the Apollo era. After post-splashdown medical checks and calls to loved ones, the crew flew by NASA jet to Ellington Field and walked into a hangar where a jubilant crowd awaited them.
“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 said, addressing the crowd and thanking the crew. “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, laughing with his crewmates, said he was at a loss for words after the abrupt shift from traveling at Mach 39 and viewing Earth from space to standing in Houston. Reflecting emotionally on the flight, he said, “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 took a Bible on the mission, publicly thanked God both at the mission’s start and again at the welcome event. “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 crew’s impression of Earth from the moonward vantage: “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 that the journey was still teaching her new lessons and that it reinforced how connected people are: “Planet Earth, you are a crew.”
Strapped into the Orion crew capsule they named Integrity, the astronauts launched from Kennedy Space Center on April 1 aboard NASA’s Space Launch System rocket — currently the most powerful operational rocket — on the program’s first crewed Orion flight. After an initial day in Earth orbit to check life-support and other systems, the team fired the service module engine for a four-day trek to the moon.
Artemis II marked NASA’s first piloted moonshot since Apollo 17 in 1972 and kicked off what the agency describes as a series of missions leading toward a sustained presence near the lunar south pole. The flight followed a free-return trajectory that let the crew observe nearly a quarter of the moon’s far side while it was sunlit.
During the mission, the crew observed a dramatic solar eclipse from their unique vantage as the moon moved in front of the sun, producing a ghostly glow and halo that left them 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 passed around the far side about 14 hours later, reaching a closest approach of roughly 4,000 miles above the lunar surface. The mission also set a new human spaceflight distance record, carrying the crew to 252,756 miles from Earth — about 4,100 miles farther than the previous human record set during Apollo 13 in 1970.
The astronauts documented the trip extensively, taking thousands of photos and hours of video and recording observations intended to help researchers study how the human eye perceives lunar color and surface features. Before launch, the science team had pinpointed a few relatively fresh, unnamed craters and the crew proposed names for some of them; mission control confirmed the naming, including one the crew had proposed to honor a loved one.
President Trump spoke with the crew by radio during the mission, calling Artemis II a step toward a renewed American presence on the moon and pledging future missions, including plans for a permanent lunar presence and missions to Mars.
At the Houston welcome, Hansen said the flight showcased three elements that make a crew successful: gratitude for opportunity and the support of thousands of people, the willingness to share the joy of the experience, and love. He called his crewmates in for a group hug and told the audience, “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.”
The crew’s return marks a milestone in the Artemis program as NASA moves from demonstration flights toward sustained lunar operations and continued human exploration beyond Earth.