Artemis II Is Coming Home. They Did It.
The Artemis II crew — Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, Christina Koch, and Jeremy Hansen — are on their way home after becoming the first humans to fly around the Moon since Apollo 17 in 1972.
They’re the first humans to see parts of the lunar far side with the naked eye. That’s worth stopping to appreciate.
The mission was a crewed flyby — no landing — but the point was to prove the Orion spacecraft and Space Launch System could carry humans to lunar distance and back. By all accounts, it did.
The crew is tight on space in the Orion capsule and has been using a compact flywheel device to manage strength and cardio workouts in microgravity. Small detail, but it’s the kind of thing that matters on longer future missions.
Artemis III — a surface landing — is next. The Moon is back in the agenda. It’s been 54 years.