Artemis astronaut Jeremy Hansen described the crew’s recent return to Earth as “the best roller coaster ride you’ve ever been on.”
“For the landing, it’s like all the sights, all the feels,” Hansen said Friday at a “CBS Mornings” town hall, “Artemis II: A Celebration of Heroes.”
“The first thing you see is like plasma, the colors starting to show up. This fireball building outside the windows,” he said. “It was red, and it was coming down. And then it was like blue and green. It was like somebody was welding, like flashing.”
Speaking to an audience of students — the next generation of space explorers — he described getting “thrashed around” and being pushed to the seat with G-forces.
“It’s just all really exhilarating,” he said, adding that he and mission specialist Christina Koch fist-bumped each other during the end of their journey.
“It was phenomenal. I was completely overcome with just elation. I was overjoyed,” Koch said, describing her feelings at splashdown.
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Hansen and Koch, along with commander Reid Wiseman and pilot Victor Glover, returned from their trailblazing trip around the moon on April 10, when their Orion capsule splashed down in the Pacific Ocean off the coast of San Diego — an epic ending to their historic mission.
Koch described what it was like getting used to gravity again after 10 days in space.
“Your body isn’t quite used to orienting the way it usually does, because it got used to orienting without gravity,” she said. “It takes us a little while to get used to walking again, and get our balance, but it wasn’t too bad this time. We were only away for nine days.”
During their voyage spanning nearly 700,000 miles, the astronauts traveled farther from Earth than any humans in history and became the first humans to see some parts of the moon’s far side with the naked eye. They viewed a solar eclipse in deep space when the moon moved between the Orion and the sun, creating a ghostly glow all the way around the lunar horizon.
Their experiences were captured in stunning images.
The crew joined “CBS Mornings” on Friday for a special live town hall, where they’re taking questions from students. Jack, a 5-year-old aspiring astronaut from Atlanta who went viral, is also taking part, as is the award-winning director of “Apollo 13,” Ron Howard, and Bill Nye, “The Science Guy,” who is chief ambassador of The Planetary Society.
This story will be updated with more great moments from the town hall, which airs from 7:30a-8:30a ET/PT on “CBS Mornings” on CBS and Paramount+. Or watch it on demand later Friday on CBSNews.comthe CBS News YouTube channel and Paramount+.