Even if you’re 250,000 miles from Earth, sleep is important. However, for all the life-sustaining accouterments aboard the Orion spacecraft, the capsule lacked bedrooms, leaving the four-person Artemis II crew with a truly bizarre sleeping arrangement.
“I slept really close to an air conditioning vent. And so I’d wake up and I just see this big hunk of metal,” Glover told CNET during a video call. “And it was like, ‘Oh, I’m in space. I am weightless.'”
Sleep wasn’t just a means for the astronauts to recharge; it also grounded them during their historic journey. Glover explained, “What really resonated with me is we’re also humans. It’s like camping, and this is a very important part of this journey.”
Glover, the Orion’s pilot, along with commander Reid Wiseman, mission specialists Christina Koch and Jeremy Hansen, made up the Artemis II crew. The mission made a lot of history. It’s the first time a woman, a black man, or a Canadian has journeyed to the moon. The four Artemis II astronauts traveled 252,756 miles from Earth, farther than any other human being, surpassing the previous record set by the 1970 Apollo 13 mission.
Artemis II astronaut and pilot Victor Glover wears an orange flight suit.
When I asked Glover if he felt like Han Solo when piloting the Orion, he retorted, “Han Solo wants to be me when he grows up!” Throughout my interview, Glover was gracious, passionate and funny.
“I get to do stuff that’s cooler than Han Solo. I mean, just the fact that it’s real, it’s better.”
While landing on the moon wasn’t in the cards for this trip, the Orion crew traveled about 4,000 miles beyond the moon, allowing them to see parts of the moon that had never been seen before. For comparison, Apollo missions flew about 70 miles above the moon to make landings, limiting how much of it they could actually see.
When the Artemis II flew over the terminator, the crew said that this boundary between day and night was “anything but a straight line,” according to NASA.
For the lunar flyby, the Orion was moving fast, 60,863 mph relative to Earth, but only 3,139 mph relative to the moon, according to NASA. The speed meant the shadows across the surface were constantly morphing into different shapes. Glover was particularly enamored with the moon’s terminator, where the light and dark sides of the moon meet. The terminator isn’t fixed and depends on the moon’s position relative to the sun. As Orion moved, it transformed into various shapes that looked like letters of the alphabet.
“People know, I fell in love with the terminator when I got to see the real one up close. I watched the terminator go from a letter C to a letter D, which means there was a point when the moon was half light, half dark. It was pointing right at me.”
Watch this: Getting Personal With the Crew of Artemis II | Tech Today
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