On Tuesday, the four Artemis II astronauts continued their post-mission tour at Marshall Space Flight Center, where they thanked the teams behind their historic journey around the Moon.

NASA astronauts Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover and Christina Koch, along with Canadian Space Agency astronaut Jeremy Hansen, spent the day meeting with members of the Marshall workforce who helped develop, test and support the systems that carried them into deep space.

The crew also took time to speak with media about the mission, the people behind it and what it meant to return to Huntsville five months after launch.

Asked by 256 Today what gave him the confidence to climb aboard after Marshall’s Space Launch System team said the rocket was ready, Artemis II Commander Wiseman didn’t hesitate.

“One word is trust,” Wiseman said.

“This has been a part of us for a long time,” he continued. “So building trust in this team, a lot of the folks that we see here when we’re speaking, especially in Huntsville, are friends. They’re our career-long friends, and we know the rigor and the discipline that NASA puts into everything.”

The crew understood the risks of flying humans aboard SLS and Orion for the first time, Wiseman said, but their confidence in the people behind the spacecraft ran deep.

“We always know there’s possible things can go wrong. We know the risk when we’re getting on this vehicle,” he said. “But that trust, it runs really deep with us.”

The visit came a day after thousands packed Toyota Field in Madison for a public celebration of the crew. Tuesday’s stop brought the astronauts inside the NASA center that manages the SLS program and face to face with the workforce behind the rocket.

“Being here, talking to this team has been high on our list,” Hansen said.

“One of the things that has really impacted us is just how much harder it is to do what this team did than I would have even imagined,” he said. “I already knew it was a challenge, but seeing it from the inside and living that day after day for three years, really came to understand how incredible the challenges that this team faced and the solutions they created to overcome them.”

That same emphasis on teamwork carried into the crew’s own preparation for the mission.

Glover said the three years leading up to Artemis II included simulator training, lunar science, testing and preparation for emergencies, but also learning how to work together.

“We wanted to be the best team that we could,” Glover said. 

The team successfully put that preparation to the test April 1, when Artemis II launched aboard SLS and Orion for a nearly 10-day journey around the Moon, the first by humans since the Apollo era, before splashing down in the Pacific Ocean April 10.

Since returning, the astronauts have been visiting the people who helped get them there and home, something Koch described Tuesday as a “congratulations and gratitude tour.”

“We couldn’t be happier to be with people that we consider our family,” Koch said. “We were surrounded by these teams throughout our preparation.”

“We built that trust that we talked about by working with them on getting to root cause of any things we were chasing down before we ever said we were ready to fly this thing,” she said. “That trust turned into gratitude, turned into congratulations. And that’s why we’re here.”

For Wiseman, Huntsville’s connection to human spaceflight extends well beyond Marshall.

“Everybody is just kind of immersed in this culture together, and you can tell this place has just a very good culture, very tight-knit community,” he said. “And they’re deeply proud that they’ve been powering us off of this planet since the late 1950s, early 1960s.”

“It’s just steeped in tradition here, and we love coming to be a part of that.”

The crew is already looking toward what comes next.

“Artemis III is next,” Wiseman said.

He said Artemis II’s performance provided confidence in Orion as NASA prepares for more complex missions ahead.

“It gets a lot riskier from here,” he said. “And so those next crews will have more confidence because of what they saw from this mission.”

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