The four-person crew of Artemis II—Commander Reed Wiseman, pilot Victor Glover, mission specialist Christina Koch, and mission specialist Jeremy Hansen—traveled farther than ever before from Earth, reaching as close as 252,756 miles from our home planet.
“We most importantly choose this moment to challenge this generation and the next generation to ensure that this record does not stand for long,” Canadian astronaut Hansen said as the crew surpassed the previous record of 248,655 miles set during Apollo 13.
Integrity began its rapid descent when the spacecraft hit Earth’s atmosphere at about 24,000 miles per hour, entering a communications blackout and slowing down from friction as its heat shield reached temperatures of about 3,000 degrees Fahrenheit. The plan was for the capsule to deploy two drogue parachutes at an altitude of about 22,000 feet, slowing it to about 200 mph, then deploying the three main parachutes pulling the pilot chute to an altitude of about 6,000 feet. This will slow the spacecraft to about 20 miles per hour before plunging into the ocean.
During their mission, the Artemis II crew saw things that no humans had seen before. Flying higher above the Moon’s surface than the Apollo missions, the astronauts were the first to view the entire far disk of the Moon. They also observed a solar eclipse from around the moon as the Sun slipped behind the lunar disk and illuminated it from behind.
“Humans probably haven’t evolved to see what we’re seeing,” said Glover, a NASA astronaut during the eclipse. He and the rest of the team described a halo of light around the moon, while one side of the moon’s surface was bathed in Earth’s glow. Venus, Mars and Saturn shone among the stars. “It’s really hard to describe. It’s amazing.”
Artemis II debuted April 1 when the crew launched from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida atop a 322-foot-tall Space Launch System rocket, the most powerful vehicle ever to carry humans. After performing several altitude-boosting engine burns and testing the spacecraft’s manual controls, the crew began an engine firing known as translunar injection on the second day of the mission, which sent them on a trajectory to the Moon.
For the next three days, the crew tested the Orion spacecraft’s systems, practiced wearing their space flight suits, burned additional course corrections, manually refloated the Orion capsule, and prepared for lunar flight around the far side of the Moon. They also had trouble flushing waste water from the Orion capsule’s toilet out into space.
“We definitely have to fix some plumbing,” NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman said during a conversation with the crew.
At 12:41 a.m. Eastern Time on April 6, Artemis II entered the Moon’s sphere of influence, where the Moon’s gravity overcomes Earth’s. That day, the crew made its closest approach to the Moon, flying about 4,000 miles above the Moon’s surface. During the lunar flight, the crew communicated with a team of scientists on the ground, before and after an approximately 40-minute communications blackout on the far side, to describe geologic features such as craters and canyons.
Shortly after breaking the distance record, the crew proposed names for two young, unnamed craters on the Moon. The first he named Integrity after his spacecraft, and the second he named Carol in honor of the wife of Commander Reed Wiseman, who died of cancer in 2020.
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