Artemis II crew to receive top US space medal for historic lunar journey

The crew of the historic Artemis II lunar flyby mission have earned the US’s top space medal, officials have announced.Cmdr Reid Wiseman, pilot Victor Glover, and mission specialists Christina Koch and Jeremy Hansen are set to receive the Congressional Space Medal of Honor on 28 August, the US space agency Nasa said.Nasa’s website indicates that only 30 astronauts have gained the honor – among them Neil Armstrong, the first person to walk on the moon, and John Glenn, who was first to orbit Earth and then served four terms in the US Senate.Wiseman, Glover, Koch and Hansen were selected for the medal, despite its name, by Donald Trump after the Nasa administrator, Jared Isaacman, recommended them to the president.The Artemis II crew broke Apollo 13’s record for farthest distance traveled from Earth during their 10-day mission, which began on 1 April. They reached 252,756 miles (406,771km) as they swung above the lunar surface, surpassing the 1970 record of 248,655 miles as part of US plans to again land on the moon – then eventually reach Mars.“This was not easy,” Wiseman said to reporters after the Artemis II mission safely ended with a textbook splashdown in the Pacific Ocean. “Before you launch, it feels like it’s the greatest dream on Earth. And when you’re out there, you just want to get back to your families and your friends. It’s a special thing to be a human, and it’s a special thing to be on planet Earth.”The medal ceremony scheduled for Wiseman and his colleagues at the Johnson Space Center in Houston comes four months after Trump hosted the Artemis II crew at the White House. The occasion was marked in part by the president, who turned 80 in June, telling the astronauts: “I would have had no trouble making it – I’m physically very, very good.”Nasa listed an 11am start time for the ceremony, with a video live stream of the event available at www.nasa.gov/live.Trump has sought to embrace the Artemis II crew’s achievements despite his administration’s proposal to cut Nasa’s budget by 23%, including a 46% reduction for space science initiatives, for the 2027 fiscal year beginning on 1 October. A House commerce, justice and science subcommittee led by Trump’s Republican party responded by advancing its own Nasa budget proposal that would maintain the science projects the president has been aiming to eliminate.Beside Armstrong and Glenn, previous Congressional Space Medal of Honor recipients include astronauts who were killed in the Apollo I fire as well as the explosions of the Challenger and Columbia space shuttles.Douglas Hurley and Robert Behnken were the last astronauts to have been chosen for the medal before the Artemis II crew. Hurley and Behnken in 2020 became the first to launch into orbit on a commercial spacecraft, and they accepted the medal in 2023 during Joe Biden’s presidency.