Reid Wiseman asked to see a Navy chaplain after Artemis II splashed down and the four crew members were taken aboard a U.S. Navy ship for medical evaluation, then said he broke down in tears when he saw the cross on the chaplain’s collar.
Speaking Thursday at a NASA press conference in Houston, Wiseman said he is not really a religious person and felt there was “no other avenue” to explain or experience what had just happened. He described the moment in stark terms: “When that man walked in — I’d never met him before in my life, but I saw the cross on his collar, and I just broke down in tears.”
The comments came as the astronauts began the slow work of making sense of a mission that had already crossed the threshold from flight to memory. Artemis II returned to Earth after its historic trip around the moon, a journey that left Wiseman saying, “It’s very hard to fully grasp what we just went through.”
He also recalled looking out at the moon and seeing “the sun eclipsed behind the moon,” a sight he said he turned to Victor Glover to describe as something humanity may not yet be ready to comprehend. “I turned to Victor and I said I don’t think humanity has evolved to the point of being able to comprehend what we are looking at right now, because it was otherworldly and it was amazing,” Wiseman said.
Glover, who said he is a religious person, said he had not spent much time processing the mission and called re-entry “a very intense moment.” He said everything mattered in that phase — “every noise, every mechanism” — and added that he could tell, “I could tell we were in a fireball.”
Christina Koch said she was “completely overcome” when the hatch finally opened after the capsule landed in the water, describing “pure elation” at being home and seeing people come to bring the crew out. The return itself carried extra weight after the spacecraft faced scrutiny over heat shield concerns before the final descent, a reminder that even a triumphant splashdown still comes with unfinished questions.
Wiseman later said the most beautiful thing he heard was learning that a moon crater would be named after his late wife, who was the mother of his two daughters. “She was an amazing human being, and she’s the mother of my two daughters,” he said, adding that “what man on this planet deserves a gift like that — to have your crew be so thoughtful and to do something so caring and so deep and so meaningful.”
For now, the mission is over, but the reckoning with it is just beginning. The astronauts have come home from a flight few people will ever experience, and Wiseman’s first instinct was not to explain the journey to the public, but to sit with a chaplain and cry.
