To the Moon and Back Again with Reid and Christina

Nelufar Ramji (0:00)

Houston We Have a Podcast. Welcome to the official podcast of the NASA Johnson Space Center, episode 440, To the Moon and Back Again. I'm Nelufar Ramji, and I'll be your host today. On this podcast, we bring in the experts, scientists, engineers, and astronauts, all to let you know what's going on in the world of human spaceflight and more. On April 1st, 2026, Artemis II launched on a nearly 10-day voyage around the moon, marking the first crewed flight of NASA's Orion spacecraft. NASA astronauts Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, and Christina Koch, along with Canadian Space Agency astronaut Jeremy Hansen, splashed down on April 10th in the Pacific Ocean off the coast of San Diego. At their farthest point, the crew traveled 252,756 miles from Earth, setting a record for the greatest distance humans have traveled in space and observing the lunar surface like never before.

Since they've been back, the crew have been on a whirlwind tour, sharing their experiences with the world. And of course, we had to have them back on Houston We Have a Podcast. We heard from the crew when they were selected for Artemis II on Episode 283, and then right before they flew on Episode 417 And we've had a chance to get to know them right here on the podcast. Coming back from their journey, we sat down with each of the crew individually to hear their reflections, and we laughed, we cried, and everything in between. I hope you enjoy these conversations after their historical mission. Let's go for our crew, our teammates, and all humanity.

Reid, welcome back.

It's been a little over three months since the Artemis II mission, and that mission took you around the moon. So first off, tell us what that was like.

Reid Wiseman (2:02)

It was the greatest adventure that four humans can ever go on.

I mean, we know the crew well. I was with Victor, Christina and Jeremy this morning. We're still bonded just like we were during the mission, and getting to see some of the sites. I guess the biggest surprise to me was seeing a space station flyer on this. I knew the crew was going to be good. I knew mission control was going to be good. I was pretty sure the vehicle was going to be good. The thing that blew my mind was how quickly we left Earth. I mean, it was just gone, especially on the second, third day. It just was so small and getting smaller. It was this little crescent out the window. And from my time in the space station, it was just shocking to me. I didn't expect that. I didn't expect us to just be gone so quickly.

Nelufar Ramji (2:48)

It just disappears in the background. And everyone will ask you about launch. But was there a quiet moment, maybe days later, the next day when you suddenly thought, I'm actually on my way to the moon?

Reid Wiseman (3:02)

I think we've started to talk about this a little bit as a crew. And for me, I don't know if it was a protectionary element in my brain, but I kind of thought at all times before every one of these major burns, that if something didn't go right, we were going to go home. So we launch off of the Cape, off of Pad 39B at the Cape, and we go out to our first Apogee where we need to raise our perigee or we're going to come straight home. In my mind, it was like, well, if this doesn't go great, we're going to be home in 45 minutes.

And then it went great. And then we did our giant Apogee raise burn and we're going out to 38,000 miles, 24-hour orbit. And I thought at the peak of that orbit, I was like, all right, well, if it's not going great, we're just going to go home. And then we did our Apogee raise burn and it went great. And we weren't going home. And then our next step is trans lunar ejection. And heading into that burn, Jeremy and Christina were at controls of the vehicle.

Victor and I were supporting. And we had a few things go a little bit wrong as we're cruising through the Van Allen belts. Christina lost her computer. And so she had to go to backup procedures. And then we had a cabin leak suspected warning come up. And that got us our adrenaline going. So we're like 20 minutes from translunar injection and we have a cabin leak suspected. And I'm just kind of sitting there like, maybe we are actually going to go home on this one, but everything was looking good. And Michigan Troll did a superb job of cleaning that up. And then we did translunar injection. And then it was kind of then that all of those thoughts of, we're just going to go home. They went into the background. And now we're not going home. We're going to the moon. And from that point on, I never thought about anything else other than we're going to the moon.