“There are a lot of photos, a lot of stories, and oh my God, I haven’t even started the process we’ve gone through. We still have two days to go, and it’s too deep to ride a fireball through the atmosphere.”
Glover and fellow NASA astronauts Reed Wiseman and Christina Koch, and Canadian astronaut Jeremy Hansen are the first wave of astronauts in a multibillion-dollar series of missions under the Artemis program, which aims to return humans to the lunar surface by 2028 before China does, and establish a long-term U.S. presence over the next decade, building a moon base for possible future missions to Mars.
Koch presented the mission series as a relay race, telling reporters: “In fact, we have batons that we have purchased as physical symbols.”
“We plan to hand him over to the next group and everything we do is with him in mind,” he said.
The next mission, Artemis III, will include a low-Earth orbit docking test between the Orion capsule and both astronaut lunar landers, which NASA plans to use to place its astronauts on the Moon in subsequent missions.
Artemis IV, targeted for 2028, will be the program’s first crewed lunar landing and the first since Apollo 17 in 1972.