The crew of NASA’s Artemis II mission praised the performance of the Orion capsule, built by Lockheed Martin, which took astronauts on a trip around the Moon and back to Earth, saying that future teams using the vehicle will be “in great shape”.
“This spacecraft performed very well,” said Reid Wiseman, who served as mission commander.
He highlighted some parts of the trip that didn’t go exactly as planned, including problems with a waste disposal system from the bathroom to space and a smoke detector that went off unexpectedly.
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“Want to get someone’s attention real quick? Make a fire alarm go off on your spacecraft when you’re still about 80,000 miles from home,” he said.
Overall, though, he said the capsule worked as expected.
It’s been almost a week since the NASA crew completed the mission, traveling further into space than any human has gone before and orbiting the Moon for the first time in more than 50 years.
Wiseman was joined by NASA astronauts Victor Glover, mission pilot, and Christina Koch, mission specialist. Rounding out the crew was Canadian astronaut Jeremy Hansen.
NASA claims that Artemis II — named after the Greek goddess Artemis, twin sister of Apollo, in an allusion to the US lunar program of the 1960s and 1970s — is just the first of many manned missions to the Moon. The plan is to land humans again on the satellite in 2028 and, in the long term, establish a base there where astronauts can live and work.
The recent trip captured the attention of audiences around the world from the moment the four-person crew lifted off from Florida’s Kennedy Space Center on April 1. For the mission, NASA used the Orion capsule, from Lockheed, and the Space Launch System rocket, built by Boeing.
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Over the 10 days of the trip, spectators followed the astronauts’ daily lives, from ordinary moments, such as shaving, to impressive records of an eclipse as the ship passed the Moon.
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