Victor Glover and the Artemis II crew win the nation's top spaceflight honor

NASA astronaut Victor Glover has added the country's highest spaceflight honor to a year that already made history. In April he piloted Artemis II around the moon and became the first Black astronaut to fly past it.

The medal ceremony

On Aug. 28 President Donald Trump and NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman presented the Congressional Space Medal of Honor to all four Artemis II astronauts at Johnson Space Center in Houston. Glover shared the stage with commander Reid Wiseman and mission specialist Christina Koch along with Canadian astronaut Jeremy Hansen. Only 34 astronauts have received the medal since Congress first authorized it in 1969 and the Artemis II crew now fills the 31st through 34th spots.

The ceremony also noted that Glover and Koch were the first Black person and the first woman to fly by the moon. Hansen became the first Canadian to leave low Earth orbit.

A record-setting flight

Artemis II lifted off April 1 and carried the crew about 252,756 miles from Earth, farther than any humans have traveled. The capsule splashed down off San Diego on April 10. It was the first crewed trip toward the moon since Apollo 17 in 1972.

From a Navy cockpit to the moon

Glover grew up in California and is a Navy captain and test pilot who flew 24 combat missions. He was working as a legislative fellow in the U.S. Senate when NASA picked him for its 2013 astronaut class. In 2020 he flew as pilot of the SpaceX Crew-1 mission and spent 168 days on the International Space Station. That made him the first Black astronaut to finish a long-duration spaceflight. He also took part in four spacewalks.

More honors ahead

On Oct. 17 the crew will accept the Stephen Hawking Medal for Science Communication at the STARMUS VIII festival in Santa Cruz de Tenerife in Spain's Canary Islands. Organizers chose them for the way they shared the mission with the public through interviews and social media along with school outreach.

Glover is also set to be honored with an XCEL Impact award at the XCEL Summit for Men in Orlando on Oct. 21 to 23. A bill to award the whole crew a Congressional Gold Medal was introduced in late June and had not passed either chamber by the time of the August ceremony.