Moon Voyage Heroes Speak

Fresh from their historic lunar orbit, the Artemis II astronauts are scheduled for a postflight news conference on April 16, 2026, at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston. NASA astronauts Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, and Christina Koch, together with Canadian Space Agency astronaut Jeremy Hansen, will discuss their groundbreaking 10-day journey around the Moon.

The Artemis II mission, which launched on April 1, 2026, from Kennedy Space Center in Florida aboard NASA’s Space Launch System (SLS) rocket, achieved several significant milestones. These included testing life support systems, manually piloting the Orion spacecraft, and performing critical maneuvers around the Moon. The mission also boasted a lunar flyby that provided unprecedented views of the Moon’s far side and set a new record for the farthest distance humans have traveled from Earth.

The astronauts safely returned to Earth on April 10, splashing down off the coast of San Diego before arriving in Houston the following day. They are currently undergoing standard postflight reconditioning and participating in lunar science debriefs. The upcoming news conference will be live-streamed on NASA’s YouTube channel, with additional coverage available across various online platforms.

NASA continues to push the boundaries of space exploration, with plans to send Artemis astronauts on increasingly challenging missions. These endeavors aim to expand scientific discovery, reap economic benefits, establish a sustained human presence on the Moon, and eventually send astronauts to Mars, marking a new era of interplanetary exploration.