Donald Trump welcomed the Artemis II crew to the White House on Wednesday, hosting the four astronauts in the Oval Office after their record-setting lunar flyby. The crew joined him for a celebratory meeting and press conference days after their capsule splashed down in the Pacific Ocean.
The four astronauts — commander Reid Wiseman, pilot Victor Glover and mission specialists Christina Koch and Jeremy Hansen — broke Apollo 13’s farthest-distance-from-Earth record earlier this month, reaching 252,756 miles, or 406,771km, from Earth. Their Orion capsule, dubbed Integrity, ended its 10-day lunar odyssey with a splashdown off the coast of San Diego on 10 April.
Trump praised the astronauts during the White House appearance, saying, “We’re very proud of these people. They have unbelievable courage, unbelievable a lot of other things too.” He also joked that he could have handled the flight himself, saying, “To get in there, you have to be very smart, have to do a lot of things physically good. So I would have had no trouble making it, I’m physically very, very good. Maybe a little bit of a problem. We’ll have to try it.”
The meeting added a celebratory moment to a mission that already had a place in space history. Apollo 13 set the distance mark in 1970 at 248,655 miles, and the Artemis II crew went farther on a mission that was meant as a lunar flyby, not a landing.
The visit also came against a sharper budget backdrop. Earlier this month, Trump announced his intention to slash Nasa’s budget by 23%, including a 46% cut for space science initiatives, even as he had previously congratulated the agency on Truth Social and called the crew “great and very talented.” For the astronauts, the White House praise and the proposed cuts sat side by side in a way that captured the political split around the program: celebration for the achievement, pressure on the agency that made it possible.
What comes next is the question hanging over the mission’s political afterglow. The crew has already delivered the milestone; now Nasa must navigate a budget fight that could shape how quickly the next deep-space chapter moves forward.