The ‘wave’ went around Toyota Field. Astronauts joked with the crowd, traded stories from nearly 10 days in space and marveled at the packed stands.

But beneath the fun Monday night was a simple message from the four people who rode a Rocket City-built rocket around the Moon: Thank you.

NASA astronauts Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover and Christina Koch and Canadian Space Agency astronaut Jeremy Hansen received an enthusiastic welcome at the home of the Rocket City Trash Pandas, returning to North Alabama months after their historic Artemis II mission.

For much of the evening, however, the astronauts turned the attention away from themselves and toward the engineers, technicians, manufacturers and families who helped put them into space.

At one point, Wiseman asked anyone in the stadium who had worked on Artemis II to stand.

“If you had your hands on hardware, or you signed contracts, or you worked in legal or HR or systems engineering, if you did anything on Artemis II where your hands were involved, why don’t you just stand up,” Wiseman told the crowd.

People throughout Toyota Field rose.

Then he asked their families to stand, too.

“We appreciate you allowing your mom or dad, brother, sister to go to work and do what they did to get us around the Moon,” he said.

The moment captured the theme of an evening that was part homecoming, part mission debrief and part celebration of Huntsville’s generations-long role in human spaceflight.

NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville manages the Space Launch System program, the massive rocket that launched Artemis II from Kennedy Space Center on April 1. Marshall teams also built the Orion stage adapter connecting the rocket’s upper stage to the Orion spacecraft.

The crew returned to Earth April 10 after becoming the first humans to travel around the Moon in more than 50 years.

On Monday, they made clear that they considered North Alabama part of their crew.

“You put this rocket together,” Wiseman told the crowd. “You let us sit on board and you had the courage to let us go fly, and we flew a perfect mission down the rails and you all brought us home safely. So thank you.”

Then he widened the congratulations.

“Huntsville, Madison, Rocket City, thank you and congratulations,” he said. “You did this. This is awesome to be here.”

‘We went for you, Rocket City’

The crew entered Toyota Field to cheers from the packed stadium before settling in for a conversation that ranged from launch and lunar views to sleeping in cramped quarters and the camaraderie that developed aboard Orion.

Glover delivered one of the evening’s most direct messages to the people who built the rocket beneath them.

“When we sat on top of your rocket, we said something that meant something special to us,” Glover said. “I was the one that said, ‘We are going for our teammates,’ and I’m here to tell you right now, I meant you. We went for you, Rocket City.”

He recalled the thousands who watched the rocket roll out and the more than 300,000 people who gathered around Kennedy Space Center for the launch.

But, Glover said, SLS would have been little more than an impressive monument without the engineering behind it.

“All that beauty and all that community and all that hard work, everything that every engineer and technician and manufacturer did would have just produced a beautiful monument, a statue, if it weren’t for the fact that you all built it, built it well enough to have trust to give it to us,” Glover said.

“And in turn, we had the trust to give it our lives.”

The crew also gave the crowd a glimpse of what those lives were like during the mission.

They described the violence and exhilaration of launch, watching Earth rapidly shrink in the distance, seeing the far side of the Moon and witnessing a solar eclipse from a perspective available to only a handful of humans.

Koch described looking back at the tiny Earth from the vicinity of the Moon and the perspective it gave the crew.

“We saw some extraordinary things from the perspective of the far side of the Moon,” Koch said. “Tiny Earth.”

She said the crew often talked while looking out the window about “how fortunate we are as a species to live on tiny Earth.”

The astronauts also kept the evening light.

They joked about cramped living quarters, floating food, sleeping habits and adjusting to gravity again. At one point, the crew directed sections of the stadium through a wave, sending the crowd around Toyota Field in another decidedly Earth-bound exercise in teamwork.

‘This moment of making it home wasn’t truly complete until we came here’

Marshall Space Flight Center Director Rae Ann Meyer opened the evening by recognizing the workforce behind the mission.

“When people see a rocket launch, they see fire and smoke, and I think that’s pretty cool,” Meyer said. “But here in Huntsville, we also know the people behind it, the engineers, technicians, scientists and thousands of others who pour their talent, heart and dedication into every mission.”

The astronauts repeatedly returned to those people throughout the night.

They described the trust required to climb aboard a rocket assembled through years of work by people spread across NASA, its contractors and communities such as Huntsville.

And after traveling hundreds of thousands of miles through space, Koch told the crowd that coming back to the people who helped send them there felt like the final piece of the journey.

“I can promise you that this moment of making it home wasn’t truly complete until we came here,” the astronaut said. “This is a huge part of our team and the family is here.”

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