NASA-Artemis-Moonshot

The Artemis II astronauts have captured Earth's brilliant blue beauty as they zoom ever closer to the moon. NASA released the crew's first downlinked images Friday, 1 1/2 days into the first astronaut moonshot in more than half a century. The first photo taken by commander Reid Wiseman shows a curved slice of Earth in one of the capsule's windows. The second shows the entire globe with the oceans topped by swirling white tendrils of clouds. It even includes a pale green aurora. As of midday Friday, the crew was 100,000 miles from Earth and quickly gaining on the moon.

The Artemis II astronauts are chatting it up with their friends aboard the International Space Station. Still aglow from their triumphant lunar flyby, the three Americans and one Canadian put in a call to their station colleagues Tuesday while heading home from the moon. It's the first such moonship-to-spaceship radio linkup ever. “We have been waiting for this like you can’t imagine,” the commander Reid Wiseman said. NASA's Apollo moonshots had no off-the-planet company back in the 1960s and 1970s. For Artemis II's Christina Koch and the station's Jessica Meir, it was a joyous space reunion despite being 230,000 miles apart. The two teamed up for the world's first all-female spacewalk in 2019.

The first astronauts to visit the moon in more than a half-century are home. Artemis II’s crew of four emerged from their lunar capsule after a splashdown in the Pacific on Friday evening and were flown by helicopter to the Navy’s recovery ship. The three Americans and one Canadian set a distance record for space travel during their lunar flyby, surpassing NASA’s Apollo 13. Artemis II’s astronauts didn’t land on the moon or even orbit it. Instead, they ducked behind the moon’s far side and captured views never before seen by the human eye, along with a total solar eclipse. A finicky toilet seems to have been their biggest problem in space.