Five seconds of free fall: Astronauts describe historic moon mission — and nail-biting return to Earth

By Jackie Wattles, CNN

(CNN) — The four Artemis II astronauts, fresh off a bold and risky mission that captured the hearts of a world in tumult, are taking questions Thursday for the first time since their return.

NASA is livestreaming their news conference appearance, beginning at 2:30 p.m. ET, on the space agency’s YouTube channel.

The crew — including NASA’s Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover and Christina Koch, and Canadian Space Agency astronaut Jeremy Hansen — has been back on Earth for one week after a history-making, slingshot trip around the moon. They’ve found themselves newly minted celebrities.

“When we came home, we were shocked at the global outpouring of support, of pride, of ownership of this mission,” Wiseman said Thursday. “That’s what the four of us wanted. We wanted to go out and try to do something that would bring the world together.”

The 10-day mission marked the first time astronauts have traveled to the moon since the final Apollo flight in 1972. The crew also ventured deeper into space than any human before, surpassing the Apollo 13 record set in 1970.

Koch added that it was difficult to describe “how much it meant to us to hear that the mission had an impact.”

“I cannot overstate how important that was to us,” Koch said of inspiring the public. “It was every bit as important as accomplishing the technical goals and being there for our NASA teammates was to make this the world’s mission.”

Five seconds of free fall

Last week, the crew returned to Earth, enduring the jarring moment of reentry — the point at which the astronauts hit Earth’s thick inner atmosphere while their capsule was still traveling more than 30 times the speed of sound.

Glover described it as a visceral experience, having been stunned by the sound of parachutes deploying after the Orion capsule plummeted through the air and experienced a six-minute communications blackout due to plasma created by the sheer speed at which their vehicle was moving.

“If you dove off … a skyscraper backwards, that’s what it felt like for five seconds,” Glover said, referring to the moment the capsule went into free fall after a set of parachutes broke away.

During reentry, as the spacecraft first encounters air molecules, a violent wave of compression can conjure temperatures of up to 5,000 degrees Fahrenheit. Protecting the crew during this phase of reentry is the heat shield, a layer at the bottom of the Orion capsule that is designed to char and erode in order to dissipate the heat and keep the capsule’s interior at a comfortable temperature.

On this mission, NASA flew the Orion capsule with a suboptimal heat shield. During the news conference, the astronauts said they believe they saw a moment of “char loss” — an instance in which the heat shield may have had portions become dislodged. Such char loss was seen during the Artemis I uncrewed test flight in 2022, and NASA hoped to mitigate the issue by flying Artemis II with a modified reentry trajectory. But the agency did not replace or change the heat shield between missions.

“We came in faster. We came in hot,” Wiseman said of the altered reentry path.

Despite the char loss, Wiseman said, “looking out the window that whole way in, it was a smooth ride.” He added that the astronauts are awaiting NASA’s full analysis of how the heat shield performed.

‘Looking for signs of agitation’

The crew was also candid about the unusual feelings conjured by watching your home planet disappear as you venture so far into space.

“When you look down at your display, and you see 212,000 miles, and the miles are increasing… your awareness is heightened the whole time,” said Wiseman.

“I was looking at myself — reflecting as well every day — and I was just looking for signs of agitation, or signs of stress, or signs of anxiety or tension,” he said. “One day, we were in the med kit, and we found some medication” for stress and anxiety.

“We were like, well, I just can’t even imagine taking that,” Wiseman said.

But mental health challenges were an indelible part of the experience, Glover noted.

“It is so important,” he said. “We have a team of operational psychologists and psychiatrists that help us skill up to be ready to accomplish things like this, and so we did not just do that on our own.”

Glover, Koch, Hansen and Wiseman captured striking images of the moon during their seven-hour flyby of the lunar surface, which occurred on the sixth day of their mission.

‘The closest four humans can be’

Already taking pop culture by storm, their journey and unprecedented glimpse of the moon’s far side was as captivating to the public as it was valuable for science, according to NASA.

After years of training together and more than a week spent in space, the astronauts describe their relationship as more than crewmates. They are brothers and sisters, they have said, forever bonded by the trials and triumphs of their adventure — which included living in tight quarters aboard their 16.5-foot-wide Orion spacecraft, grappling with a broken toilet, and experiencing what it’s like to glance back at Earth from the lonely confines of a spacecraft devoid of radio communications more than a quarter million miles away.

“That’s the closest four humans can be and not be a family,” Wiseman said Thursday during opening remarks.

Koch joked that when the quartet were back on Earth, tucking into beds aboard the Naval recovery ship the night they returned, the crew felt uncomfortably distant.

“We were about eight feet apart in the beds,” Koch said, “and it felt way too far.”

‘Accept a little more risk’

The astronauts said they have been busy since their return and need more time to fully appreciate the impact of their mission on themselves and the world. But they each said they were energized and prepared to continue taking bold steps forward in humans spaceflight.

Wiseman said that, if the Artemis II crew had taken a lunar lander along on the mission, “at least three” of the crewmembers would have been scrambling to use it to get down to the lunar surface. (Their 10-day trip involved a flyby of the moon, but the team did not have a vehicle capable of touching down on the surface.)

Hansen also reflected on NASA’s future endeavors, noting that if the space agency and its international partners aim to build a base on the moon, allowing astronauts to live and work there permanently, astronauts need to be comfortable with danger.

“We have to be willing to accept a little more risk than we were willing to accept in the past,” Hansen said.

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