When Artemis II splashed down in the Pacific Ocean on April 10, completing NASA’s first crewed lunar flyby in over 50 years, Stanford faculty and students were holding their breath in awe and anticipation.
The Artemis II mission launched on April 1 from Kennedy Space Center, carrying four astronauts: NASA’s Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover and Christina Koch, along with Canadian Space Agency astronaut Jeremy Hansen.
Over approximately 10 days, the crew flew around the Moon on a free return trajectory, which means the spacecraft traveled around the moon and back to Earth, relying only on gravity’s pull after the initial injection burn. The spacecraft passed within roughly 4,070 miles of the lunar surface and set a new record by traveling more than 252,000 miles from Earth — farther than any humans have ever ventured since Apollo 13 in 1970.
Unlike the Apollo mission, however, Artemis II went exactly as planned. The flight was a test of Orion’s life support, propulsion and navigation systems in deep space, with the crew conducting a series of evaluations before splashing down off the coast of San Diego.
In the Durand Building, home to the department of aeronautics and astronautics, faculty and students gathered to watch the capsule’s re-entry. When the radio blackout cut communications with the crew, the room fell silent.
“Everybody was quiet during the radio blackout,” said aeronautics and astronautics professor Manan Arya, who leads the Morphing Space Structures Laboratory. “There was applause when we heard from the crew after the blackout.” When the main parachutes unfurled on screen, “people were jubilant,” Arya said.
For Arya, whose research focuses on deployable and morphing structures for spacecraft, the mission carried professional and emotional significance. He described being struck by “the smoothness of the operation” and the apparent competency of the design, engineering and operations, especially given the flight’s complexity.
The mission also reinforced his sense of purpose for his work. “Seeing a crewed lunar mission play out made me feel the potential for impact more strongly,” he said.
This sense of possibility resonated among students as well. Ryan Erber ’29, a member of Stanford Student Space Initiative (SSI), said the mission reconnected him with what drew him to aerospace in the first place. “Aerospace engineers romanticize the ’60s and ’70s as a time where we were really locked in with our space program,” he said. “Now, going back to the moon with manned missions is just really inspiring. It shows that we’re still committed to having a presence in space.”
Excitement around the Artemis II mission also extended beyond the aerospace community. As a Canadian, Bella Zhou ’29 initially started following the mission when she heard that Jeremy Hansen would be the first Canadian astronaut to fly around the moon.
She also noticed broad public attention beyond herself, noting that “space news no longer really dominates headlines. It’s not really a topic of conversation because of how much science has demystified space exploration, so it’s very different to hear many people talk about Artemis II.”
As for what comes next, Arya expressed support for NASA’s decision to revise Artemis III, originally planned as the next lunar surface landing, to test commercial lunar landers in low Earth orbit before attempting a landing. “The lunar landers will be new complex spaceflight systems,” he said, “and it will be good to test them in low Earth orbit [LEO] before attempting a lunar landing.”
NASA currently targets 2028 for the first crewed lunar landing under the Artemis IV mission.
Erber, who works on the structures team for SSI’s entry in the International Rocket Engineering Competition (IREC), said the mission reflected his belief in the broader societal value of space exploration.
“We’re really excelling at technological development with these projects,” Erber said, pointing to satellite-based carbon dioxide monitoring as one example. “There’s so much science that you can do that benefits the earth.”