Four astronauts returning from the far side of the moon on NASA’s Artemis II mission shared their emotions as they concluded the unprecedented flight and prepared for re-entry into Earth’s atmosphere in a “fireball” during their first press conference from space on Wednesday.

The Artemis II crew, flying in the Orion capsule since launching from Florida last week, were scheduled to splash down off the Southern California coast on Friday evening after reaching the moon earlier this week. Their trajectory took them past the shadowed lunar far side, making them the farthest-flying humans in history.

On the return journey, the astronauts will reach speeds of up to 23,839 mph (38,365 kph) as they enter Earth’s atmosphere, a high-risk phase that will test Orion’s heat shield against intense friction.

“I’ve actually been thinking about entry since April 3, 2023, when we got assigned to this mission,” said mission pilot Victor Glover. “There’s so many more pictures, so many more stories, and gosh, I haven’t even begun to process what we’ve been through. We still have two more days, and riding a fireball through the atmosphere is profound as well.”

Fellow NASA astronauts Reid Wiseman, Christina Koch, and Canadian astronaut Jeremy Hansen are the first crew in a multibillion-dollar series of Artemis missions aiming to return humans to the lunar surface by 2028 and establish a long-term US presence for future Mars missions.

Koch likened the mission series to a relay race, “In fact, we have batons that we bought to symbolize, physically, that. We plan to hand them to the next crew, and every single thing that we do is with them in mind.”

Artemis III will involve a docking test in low-Earth orbit between Orion and the lunar landers designed for future moon landings. Artemis IV, targeted for 2028, will be the first crewed lunar landing since Apollo 17 in 1972.

Back on Earth, lunar scientists at NASA’s Mission Control in Houston monitored the crew’s activities, taking notes and debating real-time and recorded audio from the Artemis II mission.

The crew is due to return Friday around 8 p.m. ET (0000 GMT Saturday), capping a nearly 10-day mission. On Monday, they reached a record-breaking distance of roughly 252,000 miles from Earth, surpassing Apollo 13’s previous record by about 4,000 miles.

Wiseman said each crew member had two brief video chats with family during the mission. Hansen proposed naming a new lunar crater after Wiseman’s late wife, Carroll, creating an emotional moment both for the crew and for mission control staff.

During a six-hour lunar flyby, the crew surveyed the moon’s surface from roughly 4,000 miles above, providing real-time scientific observations. This allowed rare interactive discussions between scientists on the ground and crew members in deep space.

Koch described the moon as a “witness plate” to the solar system’s formation, emphasising that Artemis II is an early, critical step toward unlocking mysteries of our planetary neighborhood. (Arise News)

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