Artemis crew returning to Earth with 'all the good stuff' from Moon discoveries

The Artemis II crew said they have "many more pictures" and "many more stories" to share with the world as they prepare to return to Earth.

The four astronauts on board the Orion spacecraft have completed their mission around the Moon and are expected to splash down off the coast of San Diego on around 20:00 Friday US EST (00:00 GMT).

Speaking to media from space on their way home, the mission's pilot, Victor Glover, said the crew was eager to share what they had seen with the world.

It was the first time hearing from the team since they spoke after their historic lunar fly-by that saw them travel further from Earth than any other humans.

When asked during Wednesday evening's conference, about re-entry to Earth, Glover said: "We have to get back. There's so much data that you've already seen, but all the good stuff is coming back with us."

"There's so many more pictures, so many more stories," he said.

Glover added that the crew still had "two more days" before they could begin to process what they'd been through.

"I'm going to be thinking about and talking about all of these things for the rest of my life," he said.

The Artemis II mission's spacecraft, Orion, broke the record for human travel at about 13:56 EDT (18:56 BST) on Monday, beating a record of 248,655 miles (400,000km) held since 1970 by the Apollo 13 mission.

The spacecraft was not planning to land on the Moon but fly around its far side, the side which is never visible from Earth. Satellites have photographed the far side before, but the astronauts were the first human eyes to see some parts of the far side's surface and its vast craters and lava plains.

Straight after the flyby, President Trump spoke with the Orion team and congratulated them: "Today, you've made history and made all America really proud, incredibly proud."

During the most recent virtual news conference, at Nasa's Johnson Space Center in Houston, the four astronauts once again beamed into a live stream as a microphone floated between them.

They each took turns answering questions from reporters with considerable delays.

The crew was asked by the Los Angeles Times about the 40 minutes of "profound solitude" when they lost contact with Earth.

Commander Reid Wiseman said the crew had a lot of scientific work to do and it was "probably the most critical lunar observations for our geology team".

"But the four of us took a moment, we shared maple cookies that Jeremy had brought, and we took about three or four minutes, just as a crew to really reflect on where we were," he said.

For Glover, the "greatest gift" of the mission was seeing the lunar eclipse from beyond the far side of the moon.

For Wiseman, the "pinnacle moment" was when his team named a lunar crater after Wiseman's late wife, Carroll, who died of cancer in 2020.

"I think when Jeremy spelled Carol's name .... I think for me that is when I was overwhelmed with emotion and I looked over and Christina was crying," Reid said.

"Just for me personally, that was kind of the pinnacle moment of the mission for me," he continued.

The crew also said they were getting their source of news from planet Earth from their family members.

They have "been our source of how the mission is going from the public perspective," Wiseman said, before adding "obviously they're all biased".

When asked by BBC's News Science Editor Rebecca Morelle what the crew will miss most about being space, Christina Koch said she will miss the "camaraderie".

On what she won't miss, Koch said there wasn't anything.

"We can't explore deeper unless we are doing a few things that are inconvenient, unless we're making a few sacrifices, unless we're taking a few risks. And those things are all worth it," she said.

The crew now face several quieter days of checks and experiments before a final ordeal: a fiery plunge through the atmosphere at nearly 25,000mph and a parachute splashdown into the Pacific that will test the capsule's heatshield and recovery systems.