Artemis crew tells kids at town hall, moon flight was “the best roller coaster ride you’ve ever been on”

Artemis astronaut Jeremy Hansen described the crew’s recent return to Earth as “the best roller coaster ride you’ve ever been on.”

“For the landing, it’s like all the sights, all the feels,” Hansen said Friday at a “CBS Mornings” town hall, “Artemis II: A Celebration of Heroes.”

“The first thing you see is like plasma, the colors starting to show up. This fireball building outside the windows,” he said. “It was red, and it was coming down. And then it was like blue and green. It was like somebody was welding, like flashing.”

Speaking to an audience of students — the next generation of space explorers — he described getting “thrashed around” and being pushed to the seat with G-forces. 

“It’s just all really exhilarating,” he said, adding that he and mission specialist Christina Koch fist-bumped each other during the end of their journey.

“It was phenomenal. I was completely overcome with just elation. I was overjoyed,” Koch said, describing her feelings at splashdown.

Hansen and Koch, along with commander Reid Wiseman and pilot Victor Glover, returned from their trailblazing trip around the moon on April 10, when their Orion capsule splashed down in the Pacific Ocean off the coast of San Diego — an epic ending to their historic mission.

The crew joined  “CBS Mornings” on Friday for a special live town hall, where they’re taking questions from students. Jack, a 5-year-old aspiring astronaut from Atlanta who went viral, is also taking part, as is the award-winning director of “Apollo 13,” Ron Howard, and Bill Nye, “The Science Guy,” who is chief ambassador of The Planetary Society.

Crew says they shared peanut M&Ms after landing

Wiseman told a story about the crew bonding after splashdown while waiting for the crews to come pick them up.

“When we landed, we splashed down into the Pacific Ocean, waiting for the rescue forces to come open the hatch, and Christina, out of her spacesuit pocket, goes, ‘I got some peanut M&Ms, anybody want some?'” Wiseman said. “And so we’re leaning against the side of the spacecraft, just come back from the moon, eating peanut M&Ms; we were happy.”

Favorite thing about gravity 

An 18-year-old student named Levi asked the astronauts, “What is your favorite thing about gravity that you missed while you were up there?” 

Mission specialist Hansen couldn’t think of a thing. “Really, nothing. I just had the most amazing time in microgravity,” he said. 

“If you get the chance to experience microgravity, you have to do it. It’s so much fun,” though he added that it makes some things, like doing chores or going to the restroom, a little more challenging. 

“All that stuff’s a little harder in microgravity, but it is just so worth it,” he said.

At another point in the town hall, Koch described what it was like getting used to gravity again after more than a week in space.

“Your body isn’t quite used to orienting the way it usually does, because it got used to orienting without gravity,” she said. “It takes us a little while to get used to walking again, and get our balance, but it wasn’t too bad this time. We were only away for nine days.”

During their voyage spanning nearly 700,000 miles, the astronauts traveled farther from Earth than any humans in history and became the first humans to see some parts of the moon’s far side with the naked eye. They viewed a solar eclipse in deep space when the moon moved between the Orion and the sun, creating a ghostly glow all the way around the lunar horizon. 

Their experiences were captured in stunning images. 

Toughest decisions they had to make

A 13-year-old named Piya asked: “What’s the toughest decision you had to make in space, on the mission?”

The crew said it was a decision to not do something. 

Wiseman detailed the scary moment when the crew was woken up in the middle of the night to an alarm, called a “run box warning,” showing fuel was leaking from the spacecraft.

“This is the first time humans have flown this spaceship. We were testing out everything. And one of the things that we didn’t know we were testing out was our caution and warning system,” Wiseman recalled. “In the middle of the night, we had a warning come on that was a very — it was a very dramatic and important warning, which kind of gave us indications that fuel was leaking out of our spacecraft.”

“We have procedures that we must execute and we must execute them right now. So imagine all four of us are asleep. We’re floating in our sleeping bags. And we get this alarm. I wake up, and I’m looking at the display, and I’m like, ‘I think that’s a run box warning.’ And all of a sudden that got everyone’s attention immediately.” 

Wiseman said the crew immediately went to work based on their training.

“Jeremy was asleep in front of the control system. And he woke up, came underneath the controls to my left, and he’s like, ‘We need to be executing emergency response right now.’ He started to configure the propellant system for shutting down the fuel system so we could preserve the fuel that we had in the spacecraft.”

He continued, “As we were watching this alarm was coming and going, coming and going, which is unusual. Normally it would stay lit the whole time. We talked through this very rapidly and decided we would hold and not execute these procedures, because if we did it would shut down our entire fuel system.”

“We didn’t do it!” he said.

“Teamwork is 100% everything”

17-year-old Lizzy asked, “How does teamwork play a role in the success of a mission like Artemis II?”

Koch said the real heroes of the mission are not her and the three other astronauts, but their teammates in mission control and others working on the ground for years to make it happen.

“Well, I would say that teamwork is the epitome of what we do. Not only in human spaceflight but probably every endeavor you take on,” Koch said. “Teamwork is 100% everything. We learned when we saw the most amazing things in the universe, they humbled us. They made us realize that we are nothing without each other.”

This story will be updated with more great moments from the town hall, which airs at 7:30a ET/PT on “CBS Mornings” on CBS and Paramount+. Or watch it on demand later Friday on CBSNews.com, the CBS News YouTube channel and Paramount+.