NASA Artemis II Commander Reid Wiseman, who says he’s “not really a religious person,” broke down crying when he noticed the cross on a Navy chaplain’s collar after returning from the lunar flyby mission last week.
At a press conference at Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas, on Thursday, April 16th, 2026, Wiseman and his crewmates discussed their time in space. He told reporters that after landing, he had no framework to process what he had just witnessed.
“There was just no other avenue for me to explain anything or to experience anything,” Wiseman said. “So I asked for the chaplain on the Navy ship to just come visit us for a minute. And when that man walked in, I’d never met him before in my life, but I saw the cross on his collar and I broke down in tears.”
He also recalled the moment the sun eclipsed behind the moon. “I turned to Victor [Glover], and I said, ‘I don’t think humanity has evolved to the point of being able to comprehend what we’re looking at right now because it was otherworldly.'”
Pilot Victor Glover, a man of faith, shared a similar response. During an Easter Sunday interview with CBS News from space, Glover said, “We’re in a spaceship really far from Earth, but you’re on a spaceship called Earth that was created to give us a place to live in the universe.”
He added, “You are special in all of this emptiness. This is a whole bunch of nothing, this thing we call the universe. You have this oasis, this beautiful place that we get to exist together.”
Glover finished with a message for everyone. “Whether you celebrate it or not, whether you believe in God or not … this is an opportunity for us to remember where we are, who we are and that we are the same thing and that we got to get through this together.”
The Artemis II mission lasted just over a week and served as a key step toward returning to the moon and eventually reaching Mars. The Artemis III mission, scheduled for 2028, will include a surface landing.
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