Although it has been nearly a week since the four Artemis II astronauts completed their mission around the moon, the crew said Thursday that they have not yet fully come down to Earth mentally or been able to reflect on the big moments of their journey.“I haven’t spent a lot of time processing all of this,” NASA astronaut Victor Glover told NBC News in response to a question about the final moments of the flight, when the Orion capsule streaked through Earth’s atmosphere at more than 24,000 miles per hour.“I will say it was just a very intense moment, because we had never seen or felt this before. Everything was important, every noise, every mechanism,” Glover said.AdvertisementAdvertisementGlover and his crewmates — NASA astronauts Reid Wiseman and Christina Koch and Canadian astronaut Jeremy Hansen — were the first people to launch aboard NASA’s Space Launch System rocket and Orion capsule. Tensions were especially high during their final descent because the spacecraft had a known design flaw in its heat shield; NASA is still investigating the details of the shield’s performance.“I could tell we were in a fireball,” Glover said, describing the plasma outside the spacecraft during atmospheric re-entry. He admitted his first thought was, “Is it supposed to be that big?”When the hatch opened after they splashed down, Koch said, “I was completely overcome.”“I just screamed. I was so happy,” she said. “It was just pure elation and just a visceral, emotional reaction to not only being home, but people there coming to us and bringing us out — just unspeakable joy.”NASA’s Artemis II crew — Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, and Christina Koch and Jeremy Hansen pose for a photo during a press conference on Thursday in Houston. (Ashley Landis / AP)(Ashley Landis)The Artemis II mission notched a number of firsts. Wiseman, Koch, Glover and Hansen became the first people ever to see the entire far side of the moon with their own eyes, as well as the first astronauts to witness a solar eclipse from the moon. The crew set a new record for the farthest distance ever traveled from Earth.AdvertisementAdvertisementDuring their lunar flyby, the astronauts snapped stunning photos of the eclipse, as well as of the moon’s cratered landscape and rugged terrain.“When the sun eclipsed behind the moon, I turned to Victor and I said, ‘I don’t think humanity has evolved to the point of being able to comprehend what we were looking at right now,’ because it was otherworldly,” Wiseman said Thursday in a NASA briefing.Besides the lunar flyby, one of the most attention …
