President Donald Trump congratulated the astronauts of NASA’s Artemis II mission on Monday night after their orbit around the Moon, the first in over half a century.
“Today, you have entered into history and made all of America really proud, incredibly proud,” he said during a phone call to the three Americans and Canadian crew member. “You are truly pioneers of our time.”
However, since returning to power, President Donald Trump has harshly targeted the scientific sector, cutting funding, suspending projects, and significantly reducing staff.
NASA’s mission, which sent astronauts around the Moon for the first time in over half a century and further into space than ever before, represents a breath of fresh air for scientists.
“This mission is a great positive moment,” said Jacob Bleacher, chief of scientific exploration at NASA. “People have been working on it for months, years, sometimes more than a decade,” he explained.
Most Americans, including NASA researchers, were not yet born when the Apollo missions first sent humans to the Moon in the late 1960s.
The legend held a significant place in people’s minds but remained in the past… until today. “It’s just surreal,” Jacob Bleacher rejoiced from the legendary Johnson Space Center in Houston.
“This is the first opportunity for my generation to launch and really accomplish that,” he added. “I like to think of it as paving the way for future human explorations of the solar system.”
Difficult Preparation Conditions
Despite President Trump’s pressure on NASA to have astronauts land on the Moon before the end of his second term in 2029, the White House proposed a 23% budget cut for the space agency last week and significantly reduced funding for its scientific programs.
Artemis II was therefore carried out “under very difficult conditions,” explained Clayton Swope from the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS).
In this context, the successful launch of the spacecraft and the progress of the mission is “a real boost for morale,” said Amanda Nahm, a researcher at NASA headquarters.
“We are all working at NASA for this, and I think it helps us remember that our main mission is this difficult, exciting exploration: discovering new things, trying new things that we’ve never done before,” she declared.
“I think it will give us all a new lease on life,” she hoped.
Six Hours of Exploration of the Far Side of the Moon
The four astronauts of the Artemis II mission – Americans Christina Koch, Victor Glover, and Reid Wiseman, along with Canadian Jeremy Hansen – ventured further into space on Monday than any human before them as they made an exceptional flyby of the far side of the Moon, immersed in shadow, revealing a lunar surface subjected to cosmic bombardment.
This six-hour exploration of the hemisphere usually hidden from Earth’s only natural satellite was marked by direct visual observations by the astronauts, who saw impact flashes caused by meteors striking the dark and heavily cratered lunar surface. One of the craters was even named in honor of Carroll Taylor Wiseman, the wife of mission commander Reid Wiseman.
They are now headed back to Earth.
