Artemis II astronauts praise Orion capsule, reflect on mission impact
The crew of NASA’s Artemis II on Thursday praised the performance of the Orion capsule that took them around the moon and back.
“There are ways we could improve living in space and there are ways this machine could be improved, always,” Reid Wiseman, mission commander, said during a press conference at NASA’s Johnson Space Center, the crew’s first time speaking to the press since the mission concluded on April 10. “But my own personal opinion: They could put the Artemis III Orion on the Space Launch System tomorrow and launch it, and the crew would be in good shape.”
The nine-day mission marked NASA’s first crewed lunar flight since Apollo 17 in 1972. The crew — NASA’s Wiseman, Victor Glover and Christina Koch, and Canadian astronaut Jeremy Hansen — are now in a period of postflight health reconditioning, medical evaluations and lunar science debriefs at NASA Johnson.
One of the major mission milestones came hours after launch on April 1, when Glover took manual control of Orion to practice maneuvering the capsule in close proximity to the SLS upper stage in Earth orbit.
“It flew better than the sim in all areas,” Glover said, referring to the simulator at NASA Johnson he practiced on.
Wiseman added: “I haven’t looked at the tapes, but it felt flawless on board. I was running procedures; he was flying the spacecraft; Jeremy and Christina were watching the Interim Cryogenic Propulsion Stage out the window and mapping our distance to that the entire way in. And it was just like clockwork, clockwork, clockwork.”
The astronauts did encounter a few minor technical difficulties along the way, one of them being an issue with a vent line for the spacecraft’s toilet.
“The toilet worked great,” Wiseman said. “But that primary vent line got clogged or gunked. We’ll wait and see exactly what the technical reason was.”
And on the second to last day, a smoke detector was tripped. “I mean, you want to get somebody’s attention really quick, make the fire alarm go off in your spacecraft when you’re still about 80,000 miles from home,” Wiseman joked.
He added: “It wasn’t scary, but it was tense for a few minutes until we got things reconfigured.”
Orion’s reentry plunge through Earth’s atmosphere was another closely watched moment. The capsule that completed the Artemis I uncrewed demo shed more of its heat shield material than predicted, prompting NASA to alter the trajectory for Artemis II.
Wiseman said the heat shield performed well, as far as the crew could see.
“We came in fast, and we came in hot. And I will tell you, looking out the window that whole way in, it was a smooth ride. It was a very smooth ride. I maybe saw two moments of a touch of char loss.”
Once recovered from the capsule and onboard their recovery ship, the astronauts went to take a closer look. They observed “a little bit of char loss on what’s called the shoulder, where the heat shield meets the structure of the cone shape,” Wiseman said, but the bottom of the shield “looked wonderful to us. It looked great.”
The crew also reflected on the public’s reaction to their flight, which Koch said they learned about from speaking with their families during the flight.
“What we were told” by their families “was that there was an impact — not necessarily the number of viewers or anything like that — but that there was a positive impact, that it was superseding any lines, any identities that people had,” Koch said. “And when my husband looked me in the eye on that video call and said, ‘No, really, you’ve made a difference,’ it brought tears to my eyes. And I said, ‘That’s all we ever wanted.’”
