They made a thunderous entry to space with the eyes of the world upon them, hurtled faster than a speeding bullet around the Earth, then shot towards the moon with little time to draw breath.
On Monday the crew of Nasa’s Artemis II mission will get 40 minutes to themselves entirely disconnected from their home planet, journeying to a record-setting distance beyond the moon’s far side. “For those few minutes behind the moon, you’re truly isolated. No one can reach you,” said the commander, Reid Wiseman. “It’s a reminder of how alone and yet connected you are to humanity at the same time.”
Radio communications between the Orion spacecraft and mission control more than 252,000 miles away in Houston, Texas, will fall silent because the moon will be blocking the signal passage between them.
“It’s just you and the spacecraft, and that’s a very humbling and grounding experience,” the pilot, Victor Glover, said.
Artemis II’s main purpose is to test the Orion spacecraft with crew aboard, to evaluate its readiness for regular operations. In 2028, follow-on missions will land crew on the moon for the first time since 1972, opening a programme of exploration in which Nasa and international partners hope to establish a long-term presence there to develop technology for future missions to Mars.
Wiseman, 50, Glover, 49, and their crewmates Christina Koch, 47, and Jeremy Hansen, 50, will on Monday reach a distance further from Earth than the Apollo 13 mission in 1970, the previous record holder at 248,655 miles.
The astronauts said they got their first distant glimpses of the far side of the moon while still more than 100,000 miles away on Friday. “There’s been a lot of disbelief up here; just the fact of what we’re seeing, where we are … it really bends your mind,” said Hansen.
“There’s a lot of happiness … excitement. Then right away, you are humbled. The fact that four of us get to be out here just brings you to your knees … it is another level of amazing up here.”
Wiseman described it as “surreal”. “It just really put our place in the universe in perspective,” he added.
On Friday, they captured images of Earth through Orion’s windows as the spacecraft looped around Earth and then out towards the moon at a maximum velocity of 25,000mph.
NASAHansen said: “It felt like we were falling out the sky back to Earth and I said to Reid: ‘I feel like we’re going to hit it’ … To take all that in was just phenomenal.”
During the mission, the crew have spoken to media through a limited series of video links routed through the Deep Space Network, three 70-metre radio antenna in California, Spain and Australia that support communications all over the solar system as the Earth turns.
The crew were able to call their families from the capsule three days into the mission, also using the network. The astronauts each have an iPhone with them — a first for a Nasa mission — but only for taking photos and videos; they cannot connect to wifi or satellite and cannot make calls. Wiseman reported last week that he had opened up his laptop to use email and found he had two Outlook accounts loaded and “neither of them are working”.
The crew are also taking photos and video for Nasa using two Nikon D5s and four GoPro Hero 11s, and there are fixed cameras both inside and outside Orion to livestream the mission on YouTube. National Geographic has cameras aboard for documentary purposes.
NASA
The four crew include Wiseman, a former US navy test pilot who flew F-14 Tomcats before being selected to Nasa’s astronaut corps in 2009. He raised his two teenage daughters as a single father after his wife, Carroll, an intensive care nurse, died of cancer in 2020 aged 46.
Glover, a US navy aviator, flew more than 3,000 flight hours in over 40 aircraft before working as a legislative aide to the late Republican senator John McCain. He was recruited to Nasa in 2013 and has four daughters.
Koch, engineer and research scientist, is the first woman to fly around the moon. She says that heroes of the civil rights movement inspired her.
Hansen, a colonel in the Royal Canadian Air Force, was recruited by the Canadian Space Agency in 2009. Unlike all the others, this is his first spaceflight.
On flight day three — Friday, on Earth — the crew ate their first meal together in the 330 cubic feet capsule. They have been exercising on miniature gym equipment that resembles a rowing machine.
The astronauts can choose from a menu including vegetable quiche and barbecue brisket. They have to focus on ensuring minimal crumbs, which are good at escaping in the weightless environment. There is no fresh produce due to the lack of refrigeration; meals are either ready-to-eat, rehydratable, thermostabilised or irradiated to make them shelf-stable.
The crew uses water to rehydrate food and a briefcase-style food warmer. Hansen included maple syrup among his menu choices, and there are five varieties of hot sauce to help fire up the astronauts’ tastebuds, which are dulled by the effects of space travel.
They have been getting eight hours of sleep a day in sleeping bags suspended around the cabin. Their alarm calls take the form of songs played over the radio from the mission control room at the Johnson Space Center in Houston.
On Friday, the crew was blasted awake with In a Daydream by the Freddy Jones Band. “We’d all agreed we would wake up slow and get into the day easy and quiet and this morning we all got up cheering and rocking … it was the perfect way to start our day,” Wiseman said.
The crew were woken up on flight day four to the opening bars of Chappell Roan’s Pink Pony Club. There was an expectant pause after the music cut out, followed by Wiseman’s voice over the radio. “We’re all eagerly awaiting the chorus,” he said.
In the six hours that Orion will be closest to the moon on Monday, the astronauts will make observations of the lunar surface for geologists. The sun, moon and Orion will be aligned in such a way that about 20 per cent of the moon’s far side will be lit, bringing into vision regions that have never been seen directly by humans.
Nasa gives briefing on Artemis II crew ahead of Monday’s flyby
Those areas include the entire Orientale Basin, a 3.8 billion-year-old impact crater likened to Earth’s Grand Canyon, which they spotted while still only halfway to the moon. “We looked close … we were able to see the whole thing,” Glover said.
The crew were trained by geologists at the Johnson centre to identify crater shapes, surface textures, colour variations and reflectivity. Their training included an expedition to volcanic regions of Iceland that resemble the lunar landscape.
“Apollo astronauts said Iceland was one of the most lunar-like training locations that they went to in their training,” said Cindy Evans, Artemis’s geology training lead. “It has lunar-like planetary processes … it has the landscape, it looks like the moon and it has the scale of features astronauts will both be observing and exploring on the moon.”
Lakiesha Hawkins, Nasa’s acting deputy associate administrator, noted that public interest in the mission had been growing. “We have far more engagement than we had hoped to have and we hope it will increase as we continue to take further and further steps into this mission,” she said.
Hansen said: “If we can send a human around the moon in 2026, then imagine what we’re capable of doing next.”
