In an emotional moment during a press conference Thursday, the Artemis II astronauts offered a glimpse of their first thoughts after returning to Earth following their historic mission around the moon.

After splashdown, the four crew members were taken to a U.S. Navy ship for medical evaluation, and although he doesn’t consider himself a religious person, commander Reid Wiseman requested to see the ship’s chaplain.

“I’m not really a religious person, but there was just no other avenue for me to explain anything or to experience anything, so I just asked for the Navy chaplain to come visit us for a minute,” Wiseman shared.

“When that man walked in — I’d never met him before in my life, but I saw the cross on his collar, and I just broke down in tears,” Wiseman said during the NASA press conference in Houston. “It’s very hard to fully grasp what we just went through.”

Since being home, the crew has been in and out of facilities for testing, and they have not yet had the opportunity to “decompress” or reflect on the mission in its entirety.

“The sun eclipsed behind the moon,” said Wiseman. “I turned to Victor and I said I don’t think humanity has evolved to the point of being able to comprehend what we are looking at right now, because it was otherworldly and it was amazing.”

Artemis II crew pilot Victor Glover responded: “The only thing I will add is I am a religious person, but everything else is the same.”

Glover reiterated Wiseman’s point, saying they haven’t had much time to contemplate all they have experienced.

“I haven’t spent a lot of time processing all of this. I will say it was just a very intense moment, because we had never seen or felt this before. Everything was important, every noise, every mechanism,” the Christian astronaut said.

NASA’s Space Launch System rocket and Orion capsule had a successful mission, but tensions mounted during the final descent for Glover, Wiseman, Christina Koch, and Canadian astronaut Jeremy Hansen, as the space capsule had faced scrutiny for heat shield concerns.

Glover recounted the moments of re-entry into the atmosphere: “I could tell we were in a fireball,” he said, thinking, “Is it supposed to be that big?”

Koch said, “I was completely overcome” when the hatch finally opened after landing in the water.

“I just screamed. I was so happy. It was just pure elation and just a visceral, emotional reaction to not only being home, but people there coming to us and bringing us out — just unspeakable joy.”

Asked about the moment he learned one crater of the moon was to be named after his late wife, Reid Wiseman said, “I thought it was the most beautiful thing I’d heard in my entire life. She was an amazing human being, and she’s the mother of my two daughters. And what man on this planet deserves a gift like that — to have your crew be so thoughtful and to do something so caring and so deep and so meaningful.”

The Artemis II crew returns as living history, having traveled farther from Earth than any human being before them. They saw the far side of the moon and witnessed a solar eclipse from the heavens — feats once thought impossible. Yet, after touching the furthest reaches of human travel, their first instinct was to reach for the divine. May the images and video from this mission lead us to do the same.