In less than 48 hours, the Orion spacecraft is due to splash down in the Pacific Ocean. Crew members have said what they saw in space will forever change how they see the world.
After becoming the first humans to directly observe the far-side of the moon, emotions are running high as the crew prepares to reenter the earth's atmosphere and splash down on Friday in the Pacific Ocean off the California coast.
"Human minds should not go through what these just went through," said NASA's Artemis II mission commander Reid Wiseman.
"We live on a fragile planet in the vacuum and the void of space." On Monday, the crew's position of roughly 252,000 miles (400,000 kilometers) from Earth set a record held by the crew of Apollo 13 for 56 years.
Artemis II beats space travel record set by Apollo 13 To view this video please enable JavaScript, and consider upgrading to a web browser that supports HTML5 video 'Riding a fireball through the atmosphere' Mission pilot Victor Glover said he hadn't "even begun to process what we've been through," and was gearing up for reentry.
"There's so many more pictures, so many more stories … We've still got two more days, and riding a fireball through the atmosphere is profound as well." In another high-risk phase of the mission, the Orion spacecraft will reach speeds of up to 23,839 mph (38,365 kph) as it reenters the Earth's atmosphere and is battered by intense heat brought on by atmospheric friction.
"I've actually been thinking about entry since April 3, 2023 when we got assigned to this mission," Glover said, when asked how he was feeling about the return.
Artemis looks to the future Mission specialist Christina Koch, who in a previous mission set the record for the longest single space flight by a woman at 328 days, said the crew has formed a sense of "camaraderie." "I will miss being this close with this many people and having a common purpose, a common mission, getting to work on it hard every day across hundreds of thousands of miles with a team on the ground," she said.
"We can't explore deeper unless we are doing a few things that are inconvenient, unless we're making a few sacrifices, unless we're taking a few risks," she said.
The Artemis II mission is the first in a multibillion-dollar series that aims to return humans to the surface of the moon by 2028, and eventually establish a US moon base for a potential future mission to Mars.
Edited by: Elizabeth Schumacher Advertisement
