Sawt Falasteen - Artemis and ISS astronauts share celestial call

"We have been waiting for this like you can't imagine," said Artemis II mission commander Reid Weisman as his crew began the call with astronauts aboard the International Space Station.

"It's fun to be up in space with you at the same time!" said Canadian astronaut and Artemis II crewmember Jeremy Hansen.

The call came one day after the Artemis crew had a packed day filled with milestones like breaking the space travel distance record, conducting the first lunar flyby in more than 50 years, and delivering more than six hours of vivid observations of the Moon's surface.

Unsurprisingly, the ISS team had questions.

"We know how fortunate all of us are as humans to come up here and look down at the Earth from above," said ISS Crew-12 commander Jessica Meir. "Every astronaut that comes to space remarks on that."

"And we really wanted to hear what that felt like, how different that felt now from your new perspective around the Moon?"

Artemis astronaut Christina Koch -- she and Meir were the first women to participate in an all-female spacewalk -- said viewing Earth from near the Moon, which is roughly 1,000 times farther away than the ISS, was particularly striking given all the "blackness."

"It truly emphasized how alike we are, how the same thing keeps every single person on planet Earth alive."

And they commiserated about life in space, and how ISS missions -- all three of the American Artemis astronauts had previously served on the ISS -- had prepared them for their historic lunar voyage.

"Basically every single thing that we learned on ISS is up here," said Koch.

"And then, of course, there's the funny and practical, how to eat, how to do silly things with water, how to flip around. We're bringing that with us too."

And Wiseman relayed an amusing anecdote about Canadian Hansen, whose trip around the Moon was also his first time in space.

As they prepared to fire their engines to blast off towards the Moon and out of Earth's orbit, there was a moment when the view of Earth grew rapidly in the window, Wiseman explained.

"Jeremy turns around to us and goes, 'I'm not sure. I think we're going to run right into it!,'" he continued.

"We were all dyin' laughin'."

Following their lunar flyby, the Artemis II astronauts are on their long journey back home and expected to splash back down on Earth late Friday.

D.Khalil--SF-PST