Terrifying moment astronaut thought he'd never make it home after traveling over dark side of Moon
One of NASA's Artemis astronauts has opened up about the moment he felt 'real fear' the team wouldn't make it home from their trip around the moon.
In April earlier this year, Reid Wiseman was one of four astronauts on NASA's Orion spacecraft launched from Space Launch System (SLS) rocket from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida.
The Artemis II mission was the first crewed Artemis flight and marked a 'key step toward long-term return to the Moon and future missions to Mars,' NASA's website notes.
It was the first mission back to the moon in 50 years, the plan for the astronauts to travel 219,667 nautical miles from Earth, further than any human had ever gone before, testing equipment NASA hopes to use to return to the Moon's surface in 2028.
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The 'Crewed Lunar Flyby' took off on April 1, with splashdown on April 10, the mission' duration lasting a total of nine days, one hour, and 32 minutes.
However, Wiseman has since revealed there was a moment during the trip where he didn't think they would make it back.
Wiseman recalls going around the Moon in the spacecraft and the readout revealing the distance was still increasing past 219,667 nautical miles.
The astronaut began growing concerned that there had been a technical error with the spacecraft. And what would happen if that technical error interfered with being able to get home?
He told Starmus Festival in Tenerife, as quoted by The Telegraph: "Mission control in Houston had told us our maximum distance, the furthest we were supposed to be from Earth, was 219,667.
"I was watching this number, and I saw it hit 219,667, and I thought, ‘great, this is the farthest we will be from Earth, and the next number I will see will be 219,666, we’ll be going home’, but about three minutes later, I saw 219,668. It went up."
The spacecraft was over the dark side of the moon and moments later, the number had increased to 219,669 and Wiseman recalls feeling 'real fear' over having 'gone too far'.
The fear was shared by Victor Glover, the pilot, Christina Koch, and Col Jeremy Hansen, who had all discussed what would happen if they didn't make it home just two days before taking off.
Hansen told The Telegraph the crew had discussed the possibility of not coming home, sitting alive on the spacecraft uncertain of the future, noting they'd come to find a 'peace' at the possibility.
"Not because we’re brave, it’s not bravado, it’s because we had an acceptance of whatever came, we would do the best, or our time would end," he added.
Three excruciating minutes passed before the number began to decrease again and the spacecraft started back on its journey home.
Thankfully, they made it back.
Wiseman noted when they landed on the USS Martha following re-entry into the Earth's atmosphere, he asked to speak to the chaplain and ended up 'bawling in his arms'.
The astronaut told the outlet: "There was just nothing I could even say to him, the English language does not have the words for what we experienced, and he understood."
Poppy Bilderbeck