Six days after returning to Earth, the astronauts of NASA’s Artemis II mission are already thinking about what it might be like to walk on the moon.
“I’m telling you right now,” Reid Wiseman, the NASA astronaut who commanded the mission, said during a news conference on Thursday at Johnson Space Center in Houston. “If we had a first flight lander on board that thing, I know at least three of my crewmates would have been in it, trying to land on the moon.”
Mr. Wiseman said that the next big step in the Artemis program, putting astronauts back on the surface of the moon, was not a big leap.
“It’s going to be extremely technically challenging,” he said, “but this team needs to show up every day knowing it is absolutely doable, and it’s doable soon.”
The four astronauts — Mr. Wiseman, Victor Glover and Christina Koch of NASA and Jeremy Hansen of the Canadian Space Agency — talked about their experiences and how most everything went well.
“There are always things we need to improve,” Mr. Wiseman said. “Always. There are ways we need to do better living in space.”
But, he added, if the next capsule and crew of astronauts were launched into space tomorrow, “The crew would be in great shape. This vehicle really handled very well.”
The spacecraft threw some surprises at the astronauts during their 10-day mission, the first to take astronauts out of low-Earth orbit since 1972.
“We had a smoke detector go off on the next-to-last day,” Mr. Wiseman said. “You want to get somebody’s attention really quick? Make the fire alarm go off in your spacecraft when you’re still about 80,000 miles from home.”
The crew splashed down off the coast of San Diego on Friday. They were the first people to leave low-Earth orbit since 1972 and traveled farther from the planet than any humans before them.
The spacecraft’s heat shield, at least at first look, appeared to have performed well in absorbing and deflecting the heat of re-entry. During Artemis I, a test mission in 2022 without astronauts aboard, the heat shield suffered unexpected damage when sizable chunks flew off, although the capsule survived re-entry.
NASA engineers concluded that the Artemis II shield, which used the same design, was good as is if the re-entry trajectory was adjusted to reduce the heat load.
Mr. Wiseman said that on the recovery ship, before they were flown to shore, they took another look at their spacecraft, which they had named Integrity.
“We leaned under and looked at the bottom of that thing, and for four humans just looking at a heat shield, it looked wonderful to us,” he said.
Mr. Hansen said that to push ahead to the upcoming goals of landing on the moon and setting up a lunar outpost, “We have to be willing to accept a little more risk than we were willing to accept in the past, and to just trust that we will figure it out in real time.”
Earlier in the day, Mr. Hansen posted a picture on social media describing how the Artemis II crew had run simulations during the week of walking on the moon’s surface during future missions.
For Ms. Koch, since returning to Earth, the feeling of being in space has not completely left her. When she wakes up, “I truly thought I was floating, and I had to convince myself I wasn’t,” she said.
Mr. Hansen then added, “I sleep a lot better now because I don’t have Reid underneath me kicking me.”
Mr. Wiseman interjected, “Oh, come on.”
Ms. Koch said the first night after splashdown, on the Navy ship that picked them out of the Pacific, “We were about eight feet apart in the beds in the med bay, and it felt way too far.”
Ms. Koch also addressed a question about the diversity of future NASA crews.
This mission set several firsts for a mission around the moon: the first Black man, Mr. Glover; the first woman, Ms. Koch, and the first astronaut who was not an American, Mr. Hansen.
During President Trump’s first term, Jim Bridenstine, then the NASA administrator, promised that the first Artemis moon landing would include “the next man and the first woman” to walk on the moon.
During the Biden administration, the wording was adjusted to ”first woman and first person of color,” although not necessarily on the very first moon landing.
During the current Trump administration, reflecting Mr. Trump’s antipathy toward diversity equity and inclusion programs, NASA removed that language from its websites.
Ms. Koch said that women and people of color would inevitably head to the moon, because the astronaut corps now includes women and people of color.
“The fact is, you don’t have to try too hard to make that come true,” Ms. Koch said. “You’d actually have to try harder to not make that be true in the astronaut corps that we have, and I do think that’s something to celebrate.”
The appearance on Thursday followed an emotional reunion with family, friends and fellow astronauts on Saturday in Houston.
All week, they and people they know have shared their homecomings and reunions on social media.
In League City, Tex., on Sunday, neighbors lined the streets with American flags and balloons to welcome back Mr. Glover.
Mr. Hansen posted a picture on X of himself and his wedding ring in zero gravity on Sunday and wrote, “I got back in time to celebrate my 23rd wedding anniversary with Catherine today!” He said that he was looking forward to “some cuddle time on Earth.”
Ms. Koch on Monday posted a video on Instagram of her dog standing on its hind legs, pawing the windowed front door and peering out when Ms. Koch appeared on the doorstep.
“I’m still pretty sure I was the happier side of this reunion,” she wrote in the post, which received 1.6 million likes.
She also posted pictures of herself hugging her loved ones, writing: “Families are on the mission, too. They have the harder job.”
Artemis II launched on April 1 and traveled 694,481 miles in all. Future Artemis missions aim to put Americans back on the surface of the moon and, eventually, send the first astronauts to Mars.
Kenneth Chang, a science reporter at The Times, covers NASA and the solar system, and research closer to Earth.
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