The four Artemis II astronauts, freshly back from a historic trip around the moon, flew back to NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston Saturday to cheers and applause from family members and hundreds of space center workers who gathered to welcome them home.Artemis II commander Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, Christina Koch and Canadian astronaut Jeremy Hansen splashed down in the Pacific Ocean southwest of San Diego Friday evening to close out a nine-day mission, the first piloted flight to the moon and back since the end of the Apollo program a half century ago.The Artemis II astronauts greeting well wishers gathered in a hangar near the Johnson Space Center in Houston to welcome the crew home. Left to right: Canadian astronaut Jeremy Hansen, Christina Koch, Victor Glover and commander Reid Wiseman. / Credit: Miles Doran/CBS NewsAfter medical checks and phone calls home to family and friends, all four boarded a NASA jet and flew back to Ellington Field a few miles from the space center. A raucous crowd awaited them in a nearby hangar, including the crew’s families.AdvertisementAdvertisement”After a brief 53-year intermission, the show goes on, and NASA is back in the business of sending astronauts to the moon and bringing them home safely,” NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman told the cheering crowd.Turning to the astronauts, he said, “Thank you for showing us the moon again. Thank you for showing us planet Earth again, and thank you for contributing to the greatest adventure in human history. Welcome home, Artemis II.”Wiseman stood up and after joking with his crewmates, said “I have absolutely no idea what to say. Twenty-four hours ago, the Earth was…out the window and we were doing mach 39 (times the speed of sound), and here we are back at Ellington at home.”Speaking with clear emotion, he said “before you launch, it feels like it’s the greatest dream on Earth. And when you’re out there, you just want to get back to your families and your friends. It’s a special thing to be a human, and it’s a special thing to be on planet Earth.”AdvertisementAdvertisementGlover, a deeply spiritual man who carried a Bible with him to the moon, said that when the mission started he wanted thank God in public.”And I want to thank God again,” he said Saturday. “Because even bigger than my challenge trying to describe what we went through, the gratitude of seeing what we saw, doing what we did and being with who I was with, it’s too big to just be in one body.”Koch was equally moved by the experience of seeing Earth, suspended in the deep black of space, from the vantage point of the moon a quarter of a million miles away.”When we saw tiny Earth, people asked our crew what impressions we had,” she told the crowd. “And honestly, what struck me wasn’t necessarily just Earth, it was all the blackness around it. Earth was just this lifeboat hanging undisturbingly in the universe.AdvertisementAdvertisement”I know I haven’t learned everything that this journey has yet to teach me. But there’s one new thing I know, and that is planet Earth, you are a crew.”The Artemis II astronauts pose in front of their Orion crew capsule after it was recovered from a Pacific Ocean splashdown Friday and hauled into a Navy amphibious dock ship for the trip back to shore. Left to right: commander Reid Wiseman, Christina Koch, Canadian astronaut Jeremy Hansen and pilot Victor Glover. / Credit: NASA/Bill IngallsStrapped into an Orion crew capsule they named “Integrity,” the astronauts blasted off from the Kennedy Space Center on April 1 atop a Space Launch System rocket. They were the first to ride into space aboard the w …
