President Donald Trump will place America’s newest lunar pioneers in the company of legends such as Neil Armstrong and John Glenn on Friday.
Trump is set to present the four members of NASA’s historic Artemis II crew with the Congressional Space Medal of Honor during a ceremony at the Johnson Space Center in Houston.
NASA astronauts Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover and Christina Koch, along with Canadian Space Agency astronaut Jeremy Hansen, will each receive the prestigious award following their record-shattering journey around the moon earlier this year.
The ceremony began at 11 a.m. EDT, with NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman joining Trump and the astronauts.
According to The Hill, Trump is also expected to call astronauts currently aboard the International Space Station during his visit.
Artemis II launched from Florida’s Kennedy Space Center on April 1 and splashed down off the California coast nine days later. The mission marked the first crewed flight of NASA’s Space Launch System rocket and Orion spacecraft—and the first time humans had traveled to the moon since Apollo 17 in 1972.
The crew reached a maximum distance of 252,756 miles from Earth, breaking the record set by Apollo 13 more than five decades earlier.
The mission produced several other historic firsts. Glover became the first Black astronaut to travel to the moon, Koch became the first woman and Hansen became the first Canadian and first non-American to venture beyond low-Earth orbit.
The astronauts also tested Orion’s life-support equipment, manually piloted the spacecraft and conducted experiments designed to help NASA prepare for longer missions. During their lunar flyby, they captured more than 7,000 images of the moon’s surface.
Isaacman praised the crew in a message to NASA employees ahead of Friday’s ceremony.
“I think we can all agree there were no greater ambassadors to the stars than Reid, Victor, Christina, and Jeremy,” Isaacman wrote, according to NASA Watch.
“They showed the world the Moon again and the impact will be felt for generations,” he added.
Trump has celebrated the crew’s achievement since the astronauts were still in space.
During an April satellite call, the president told the crew that they had made the country proud and called them “modern-day pioneers.”
“You’ve made history and made all of America really proud,” Trump said. “There’s nothing like what you’re doing.”
Trump later welcomed the four astronauts and their families to the Oval Office, where he praised their “unbelievable courage” and suggested the administration had a strong chance of returning Americans to the lunar surface before his second term ends.
The Congressional Space Medal of Honor is awarded by the president in the name of Congress, based on a recommendation from the NASA administrator. Only 30 astronauts had received the honor before the Artemis II crew, including Armstrong, Glenn and the astronauts lost in the Apollo 1, Challenger and Columbia disasters.
Friday’s ceremony comes as Trump continues to make American dominance in space a central administration priority.
During his first term, Trump directed NASA to return astronauts to the moon through the Artemis program and created the U.S. Space Force. His administration is now targeting a crewed lunar landing in 2028.
Trump also signed a new national space-transportation policy on Aug. 20 directing NASA to help develop commercial transportation to and from the moon while expanding America’s launch capabilities.
The White House said the policy would help secure the country’s “continued superiority in space”—a mission that Friday’s four honorees helped push farther than ever before.
