Speaking at the first press conference since returning home, Commander Reid Wiseman, pilot Victor Glover, and mission specialists Christina Koch and Jeremy Hansen reflected on their historic 10-day lunar fly-by, which saw them travel a maximum distance of 252,760 miles (406,778 km) from Earth aboard NASA’s Orion spacecraft.
After flying around the moon and surpassing a 56-year-old record set during the Apollo 13 mission, the crew safely splashed down in the Pacific Ocean off the coast of San Diego just after 10am AEST last Saturday.
Their capsule hit the atmosphere at a staggering 40,000km/hr, travelling more than 30 times the speed of sound, before landing in the ocean in a nerve-racking event watched by millions around the globe.
“That was a very intense 13 minutes and 36 seconds,” Mr Glover told reporters of their descent during the press conference at NASA’s Johnson Space Centre in Houston.
“I’ve never been base jumping, I’ve never been skydiving, but if you dove off a skyscraper backwards, that’s what it felt like for five seconds,” he explained.
“And then the pilots and the mains came out, and it was glory.” ‘Broke down in tears’ After successfully splashing down in the ocean, the astronauts were flown by helicopter to a US navy ship to undertake medical evaluations.
Astronaut Reid Wiseman said that despite being “not really a religious person”, he asked the chaplain on the ship to visit the crew.
“When that man walked in, I’d never met him before in my life, but I saw the cross on his on his collar and, I just, I broke down in tears,” he said.
“It’s very hard to fully grasp what we just went through.” Mr Wiseman said in the week since their return the crew has been undergoing medical and physical testing, and “have not had that decompression”.
“We have not had that reflection time,” he said.
“When the sun eclipsed behind the....
