President Trump was set to award the four Artemis II astronauts the Congressional Space Medal of Honor on Friday, formally recognizing a crew that traveled farther from Earth than any humans before them during an April test flight around the moon.
The ceremony, scheduled for 11 a.m. at NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston, honors NASA astronauts Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover and Christina Koch, along with Canadian Space Agency astronaut Jeremy Hansen. NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman was expected to join the president and the crew on stage. The medal, established by Congress in 1969 and previously given to figures including the Apollo astronauts, is the nation's highest civilian honor for spaceflight; only about 30 astronauts have received it in the medal's history.
A record-setting test flight
Wiseman, Glover, Koch and Hansen flew a 10-day mission aboard NASA's Orion spacecraft, splashing down on April 10 after looping around the moon without landing — a deliberate shakedown flight meant to test the systems that will later carry astronauts to the lunar surface under the Artemis program. It was the first crewed mission to travel beyond the moon in more than 50 years, since the last Apollo flight in 1972, and the crew set a distance record for human spaceflight in the process.
The mission also produced several firsts: Koch became the first woman to travel to the moon, Glover became the first person of color on a lunar mission, and Hansen became the first Canadian to fly beyond low Earth orbit. NASA has said the flight cleared the way for Artemis III, which is intended to land astronauts near the lunar south pole later in the decade, part of a broader effort to establish a sustained American presence on and around the moon ahead of planned crewed missions to Mars.
Recognition amid a competitive era in spaceflight
The medal ceremony comes as NASA faces pressure to show tangible progress on Artemis at a time when China has said it intends to land its own astronauts on the moon before the end of the decade, and as private companies play an increasingly central role in the program's hardware, including the lunar lander NASA has contracted for future landings. Awarding the crew the nation's top spaceflight honor gives the administration a high-profile moment to showcase the mission's success as later, more complex phases of Artemis move toward their own test flights.
For the crew, the honor caps a mission more than a decade in the making since the Artemis program's creation, and sets up a return to the spotlight for all four astronauts as NASA begins naming candidates for the Artemis III landing crew. None of the four has been announced as a lock for that flight, though officials have said lessons from the Artemis II mission — from life-support performance to communications with mission control at lunar distances — will directly shape planning for the landing attempt to follow.
