Artemis II astronauts Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, Christina Koch, and Jeremy Hansen shared details about their historic moon mission in a recent town hall. During the conversation, telecast on CBS, the crew took up questions from students, shared their experiences about the exploration, and described the journey as “the best roller coaster ride they had ever been on”.
During the townhall, one of the students who listened to the astronauts’ experiences, asked the crew about the toughest decision that they had to make during the mission.
A 13-year-old student named Piya asked, “What’s the toughest decision you had to make in space, on the mission?”
Responding to the kid’s query, the crew said it was a decision “not to do something”.
Recalling the experience, astronaut Reid Wiseman described what they felt as a scary moment when they woke up in the middle of the night to an alarm — called a “run box warning”, suggesting that the fuel was leaking from the spacecraft.
Elaborating what exactly happened, Wiseman said, “So in the middle, this is the first time humans have flown the spaceship. So we were testing out everything. We were really testing out everything, and one of the things that we didn’t know we were testing out was our caution and warning system.”
Building upon this, Wiseman said, “So in the middle of the night, we had a warning that was a very dramatic and important warning, which kind of gave us indications that fuel was leaking out of our spacecraft. It was called a “run box warning”, and we have procedures that we must execute, and we must execute them right now. So imagine all four of us are asleep.”
“We’re floating in our sleeping bags and we get this alarm and I wake up and I’m looking at the display and I’m like I think that’s a run box warning and all of a sudden that got everyone’s attention immediately. Jeremy was asleep in front of the control system and he woke up, came underneath the controls to my left and he’s like – we need to be executing the boldface emergency response right now.”
Sharing further as to what happened next, Wiseman added, “So he started to configure the propellant system for shutting down the fuel system, so we could preserve the fuel that we had in the spacecraft and as we were watching this warning was coming and going, coming and going which is unusual. Normally you get this thing and it would just stay lit the whole time and we talked through this very rapidly and we decided that we would hold and not execute these procedures because if we did it, it would shut down our entire fuel system.”
“…We didn’t do it,” he said.
What Was Artemis II Mission?
During Artemis II’s nearly 10-day mission, the astronauts voyaged deeper into space than the moon explorers of decades past and captured views of the lunar far side never witnessed before by human eyes. A total solar eclipse added to the cosmic wonder.
On their record-breaking flyby, the astronauts reached a maximum 252,756 miles (406,771 kilometers) from Earth before hanging a U-turn behind the moon, eclipsing Apollo’s 13 distance record.
The mission also revealed a new side of our planet with an Earthset photo, showing our Blue Marble setting behind the gray, pockmarked moon. The image echoed the famous Earthrise shot from 1968 taken by the world’s first lunar visitors, Apollo 8.
Artemis III and IV
NASA already is working on Artemis III, the next step in its grand moon base-building plans. The platform from which the rocket launches headed to Kennedy Space Center’s Vehicle Assembly Building, where it will be prepped for next year’s Artemis launch.
Still awaiting an assigned crew, Artemis III will remain in orbit around Earth as astronauts practice docking their Orion capsule with one or two lunar landers in development by Elon Musk’s SpaceX and Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin.
Artemis IV will follow in 2028 under NASA’s latest schedule, with two astronauts landing near the moon’s south pole.
With inputs from AP
