Artemis II Crew Returns to Houston, Declaring Themselves 'Bonded for Life' After Record Lunar Flyby

The crew walked into a hangar at Ellington Field in Houston to a standing ovation, and Commander Reid Wiseman, handed the microphone, said he had no idea what to say. Then he turned to the three people beside him and said they were bonded for life. It was the first public address by the Artemis II astronauts after the first human voyage to the moon in more than 50 years.

The four had splashed down in the Pacific, just off the coast near San Diego, on Friday evening. They flew from there to Ellington Field, close to Johnson Space Center and Mission Control. After a short, emotional reunion with their partners and children, they stepped onto the hangar stage. In the audience were NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman, flight directors and the launch director, Orion capsule and exploration system managers, senior military officers, and the agency's astronaut corps in their blue flight suits, retirees included.

The crew is Wiseman, pilot Victor Glover, Christina Koch, and Canada's Jeremy Hansen. Over a mission of almost 10 days they went farther from Earth than any humans before them. At their peak they were 252,756 miles (406,771 kilometres) away, which surpassed the distance record Apollo 13 had held for decades. They looped around the far side of the moon and photographed stretches of it that no human eye had seen directly. They also saw a total solar eclipse and a procession of planets. One of their images, an Earthset, shows the Earth sinking behind the grey, cratered lunar surface, and it has been compared to the Earthrise photograph taken by the Apollo 8 crew in 1968.

Not everything was lofty. The crew had to contend with a faulty space toilet, and NASA has pledged to redesign the unit before longer lunar landing missions.

The speeches that followed stayed close to the human side. Texas congressman Michael Cloud told the astronauts the country desperately needed this, and the world did too, adding that they had given everyone something to build on. Glover said the gratitude of seeing what they saw, doing what they did, and being with the people he was with was simply too big, and he thanked their families. Koch said the journey began ten days earlier with the mission manager knocking on her door. It ended, she said, when a nurse on the recovery ship put her to bed and asked, "Ma'am, can I get a hug?" Both ends, she said, were human events on Earth. Hansen spoke of gratitude toward his family, NASA and the Canadian space agency, and praised the bravery and courage of everyone involved in the mission.

The timing carried its own weight. The crew returned to Houston on the 56th anniversary of Apollo 13's launch, the mission whose "Houston, we've had a problem" call turned a near-catastrophe into a legend. Jim Lovell, who commanded Apollo 13 and also flew on Apollo 8, sent the Artemis II crew encouragement in a wake-up message he recorded before his death last summer.

The flight is the first to carry humans to the moon since Apollo 17 closed NASA's first era of lunar exploration in 1972. Twenty-four astronauts traveled to the moon during Apollo, and 12 of them walked on its surface.

The success mattered a great deal for the agency's plans. Next year's Artemis III will have a new crew practice docking their capsule with a lunar lander in Earth orbit. That prepares the ground for Artemis IV in 2028, when two astronauts will attempt a landing near the lunar south pole.