In the long arc of human exploration, there are moments when the species collectively reaches beyond what was thought possible — and then pauses to honor those who bore the weight of that reaching. On August 28, at NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston, President Trump will present the Congressional Space Medal of Honor to four astronauts whose April 2026 Artemis II mission carried them farther from Earth than any humans in history, surpassing a record that had stood since Apollo 13 in 1970. Their journey — 252,756 miles from home, around the moon and back — was not merely a feat of distance,