The crew of NASA’s Artemis II moon mission discussed their “emotional” spaceflight with Jimmy Fallon on Thursday night and also talked about their cute nickname for Earth.
Astronauts Reid Wiseman, Christina Koch, Victor Glover and Jeremy Hansen made history during their 10-day mission, traveling over a quarter-million miles from Earth.
The four appeared on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon on Thursday to discuss the flight.
From that distance, Wiseman said, the Earth looked small enough to inspire the nickname “Tiny Earth.”
“Around day three, we started to call it Tiny Earth, because it’s this big out the window,” Wiseman said, making a small gesture with his hand. “So we’d say, ‘Oh, that’s Tiny Earth!’”
The trip left a deep emotional impression on the astronauts.
“The thing that is hard to understand is we’re constantly going away from or back to the planet, so it’s changing the whole mission and the view,” Wiseman told Fallon.
“That is really what gets you. We would be eating or washing up, getting ready for bed or something, and you look out the window, and you just see that Earth out there,” he said. “It was so amazing to see.”
The crew, who spent three years training for the mission, said they coped with living in close quarters by “giving each other a lot of grace.”
The crew demonstrated how cramped the Orion capsule was by holding hands and forming a circle around the talk show host, showing just how difficult grabbing a glass of water from the other side of the capsule could be.
The Artemis II crew members form a circle around host Jimmy Fallon to demonstrate how much space the four of them had to share in the Orion capsule.
(NBC via Getty Images)
“I think we surprised ourselves,” Koch said. “But these are three of the greatest humans you could ever fly in space with.”
Wiseman said that despite the cramped conditions, he shared a moving moment with the crew that “bonded them forever.”
Naming a moon crater after his late wife, Carroll, was “a crew decision.”
“Jeremy gave one of the most moving speeches, and that moment was a great honor for my kids,” Wiseman said.
“My kids were in mission control, Ellie and Katie, when that happened, and they didn’t know anything about it. It’s deeply moving for them, but also for the four of us. That kind of solidified us as a crew,” he added.
What happened on the Artemis II mission?
The Artemis II crew splashed down off the coast of San Diego on April 10 after spending more than a week in space.
At Orion’s farthest point, the astronauts traveled 252,756 miles from Earth — a record-breaking distance.
A nighttime picture of Earth taken on April 2 by an Artemis II crewmember.
((NASA))
The moon mission tested NASA’s deep-space system, with the crew circling the moon and capturing photos of its far side.
The images have not only given scientists and the public rare views of the moon’s far side, but also provided exceptional views of Earth from that distance.
The trip has been heralded as a major step toward sending humans back to the moon, including future landings and longer-term moon exploration.
On Wednesday, NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman told President Trump that the U.S. has “an achievable plan” to go back to the moon.
