WASHINGTON - President Donald Trump spoke directly to the crew of the Artemis II on Monday night and hinted their next mission could be a historic voyage to Mars as the team revealed what happened during a roughly 40-minute communication outage with NASA.
Trump praised astronauts Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover and Christina Koch, along with Canadian astronaut Jeremy Hansen, for their journey to the far side of the moon after the space travellers completed the six-hour flyby on Monday. ‘Everyone’s watching it. They find it incredible,’ he told the astronauts during a 13-minute conversation beamed aboard the spacecraft, adding that they ‘really inspired the entire world.’
The team became the first humans in more than half a century to witness the distant hemisphere with the naked eye, recording their observations for the future. ‘I just watched you go to the back of the moon and people haven’t been there in a long time, we can say,’ Trump told them.
‘However it’s going to be more and more prevalent, because we’re going to be doing a lot of traveling,’ the president said, outlining his plans for the future of space exploration.
‘Then you’re ultimately going to do the whole big trip to Mars - and that’s going to be very exciting.’
As part of the journey, the astronauts set a new record for traveling 252,756 miles from Earth, farther than any humans in history.
The astronauts had to complete part of the mission without any real-time guidance from Mission Control - relying instead entirely on their onboard systems for about 40 minutes before contact was restored when their spacecraft reappeared from behind the moon.
President Donald Trump spoke directly to the crew of the Artemis II on Monday night and hinted their next mission could be a historic voyage to Mars. (Pic: DailyMail)