Artemis II crew to receive Nation's top space medal

The four astronauts behind NASA's historic Artemis II lunar flyby have earned the country's highest space honour. Commander Reid Wiseman, pilot Victor Glover, and mission specialists Christina Koch and Jeremy Hansen will receive the Congressional Space Medal of Honour on August 28 during a ceremony at Johnson Space Center in Houston, NASA announced.

In NASA’s own official records, no more than 30 astronauts have received the distinction since its inception back in 1978, which list includes Neil Armstrong, the first man on the Moon, and John Glenn, the first American astronaut to circle the earth four times in addition to having served four terms in the US Senate.

Contrary to its misleading name, however, the medal is not selected by the US Congress but is rather conferred by the US President based on a recommendation from the NASA administrator, who nominated all four Artemis II astronauts for President Trump’s selection.

The Artemis II astronauts beat the distance record of Apollo 13 set in 1970 by going as far as 252,756 miles away from Earth over the course of their 10-day mission, which began on April 1 using NASA's Space Launch System rocket. This is a farther distance travelled by any humans than the 248,655 miles achieved by the Apollo 13 team.

It is also the first crewed mission to leave low Earth orbit since Apollo 17 in 1972 and is the first crewed test flight of NASA's Orion spacecraft. "That wasn't an easy thing," Wiseman said to journalists following the mission’s water landing in the Pacific Ocean.

"You dream about it before you go up, but once you're up there, you just want to come home to your loved ones."

The August 28 event, scheduled for 11 a.m. ET with a livestream at nasa.gov/live, comes four months after Trump hosted the crew at the White House, where the president, who turned 80 in June, told the astronauts, "I would have had no trouble making it; I'm physically very, very good."