NASA Artemis II astronauts to speak from lunar orbit

Four astronauts returning from the far side of the moon for NASA’s Artemis II mission will speak to reporters at their first press conference from space.

The Artemis II crew, who have been flying Orion capsules since launching from Florida last week, reached the moon earlier this week as they navigated a path that passed them past the shadowy far side of the moon and became the farthest humans in history to fly.

NASA astronauts Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover and Christina Koch, along with Canadian astronaut Jeremy Hansen, are the first wave of astronauts in a multibillion-dollar series of missions under the Artemis program.

It aims to return humans to the lunar surface before China by 2028 and establish a long-term US presence in the next decade and a lunar base for potential future missions to Mars.

Back on Earth, dozens of lunar scientists gathered this week in rooms adjacent to NASA’s Mission Control Center in Houston, writing notes and discussing the steady stream of audio, both real-time and recorded, from the Artemis II astronaut crew aboard the Orion spacecraft.

Advances in lunar science typically rely on lunar-orbiting satellites and Earth-based observations.

But the crew’s six-hour flight to the Moon provided a real-time stream of scientific collections from the human eye and allowed for rare back-and-forth discussions between teams on the ground and scientists more than 405,000 km into space.

Scientists see NASA’s Artemis II mission as an important early step in unraveling the mysteries of the solar system’s formation.

The Moon was a “witness plate” to the formation of our solar system, said Koch, the Artemis II mission expert, before it was launched into space last week.

The crew’s lunar surveys also provide initial assessments of what future areas might be available for robotic rovers that NASA hopes to begin flying in rapid succession starting in 2027.

The press conference is planned for later Wednesday.