3 Minutes of Fear: Artemis II Commander Feared No Return
Artemis II commander Reid Wiseman said he feared his crew might not return to Earth when the spacecraft’s distance counter kept rising beyond its expected…
TENERIFE, Spain — At the Starmus VIII festival, Artemis II commander Reid Wiseman recalled a brief moment when a rising distance counter made him fear his crew might not return to Earth. The spacecraft had passed its expected turn-back distance during the mission around the moon, before the counter began to fall.
Wiseman said the crew was expected to reach 219,667 nautical miles from Earth before turning back on the sixth day of its 10-day mission. Instead, the odometer on the Integrity spacecraft continued upward, reaching 219,668 and then 219,669 nautical miles.
For a few minutes, he thought something had gone wrong.
“And then about three minutes later, it goes to 219,669, and that was the moment that I felt real fear because I thought we had just gone too far — we're never going to come home — and so I was very scared,” Wiseman said.
3 minutes fear artemis as the counter climbed
Mission control in Houston had told the astronauts that 219,667 nautical miles would be their maximum distance from Earth, Wiseman said. He expected the next reading after that point to show the spacecraft moving closer to home. The number instead increased.
“I was watching this number, and I saw it hit 219,667, and I thought, 'Great, this is the farthest we will be from Earth, and the next number I will see will be 219,666 — we'll be going home.' But about three minutes later, I didn't see 219,666; I saw 219,668. It went up. I was like. 'Huh? That's weird.'”
The counter eventually started dropping. When it returned to 219,668 nautical miles, Wiseman told the crew, “We're going home,” according to his account. The astronauts cheered.
His crewmates did not notice his fear as it unfolded. NASA astronauts Victor Glover and Christina Koch were at a window making scientific observations of the moon, while Canadian Space Agency astronaut Jeremy Hansen sent reports to mission control.
A crewed flight around the moon
Artemis II launched from NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida on April 1. It was the first crewed flight of the Orion space capsule and the first crewed mission to travel to the moon since Apollo 17 in 1972, according to Live Science.
The nearly 10-day mission took the crew around the moon’s far side and back to Earth. Wiseman and his three crewmates were expected to travel farther from Earth than any humans before them, reaching 219,667 nautical miles, the source reported.
The episode puts a human account alongside the mission’s distance record: for Wiseman, the critical moment was not simply reaching the planned maximum, but seeing the reading continue to rise. The crew’s other work carried on as the commander watched the figures change.
Nearly every moment of the crew’s activities aboard Orion was livestreamed, according to Live Science. At the Starmus VIII festival, the Artemis II crew received the Stephen Hawking Medal for Science Communication.
In an interview with The Week Junior Science+Nature, Wiseman credited the teams on Earth for the mission’s safe return. “Getting home safely is a testament to the engineering rigor and the flight control teams back here on planet Earth, who put this rocket together and then who controlled it as we went out to the moon and came back. Those are the true heroes of this mission. They have real courage.”
Source: livescience.com
