NASA’s Artemis II crew are the fastest survivors alive, and now they have the patch to prove it.
Mission commander Reed Wiseman, pilot Victor Glover, and mission specialists Christina Koch and Jeremy Hansen (later with the Canadian Space Agency) spent 10 days flying near the Moon in early April. His journey took him farther from Earth than any human being (52,756 miles) [406,771 km]) and then, on the way back to our Orion spacecraft integrityThey accelerated to approximately 24,664 mph (39,693 km/h) as they re-entered the atmosphere.
Only three other people in history have traveled faster. NASA Apollo 10 astronauts Thomas Stafford, John Young, and Eugene Cernan set a record for the highest speed achieved by a crewed vehicle relative to the Earth’s surface: 24,791 mph (39,897 kph) on May 26, 1969.
Cernan died in 2017, Young in 2018, and Stafford in 2024.
At the crew’s post-flight press conference at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston on April 16, six days after landing, Glover said, “The number we saw on the display – and I think it was very consistent with what Orion was going to do – was Mach 38.89. But it depends on how you measure that number. It’s really challenging how you measure from space.”
Mach, as a measurement, compares the speed of an object to the local speed of sound. So the numbers vary depending on altitude, air temperature and air density. At sea level, 24,664 mph would be Mach 32, or 32 times the speed of sound.
At the point where the Artemis II crew reached peak velocity, the air was thin and the temperature was colder than sea level.
mach 39
“There will be a new [Mach patch] We will come forward when we figure it out,” Glover said.
It took three weeks to get it ready for the crew (including time at NASA’s embroidered patch supplier, AB Emblem in Weaverville, North Carolina), but the Mach 39 patch made its public debut on Friday (June 5) in a video posted to social media by Wiseman. That is, if you were paying attention to such details.
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