'Everybody wanted to be the first': Apollo astronauts were more competitive, Artemis 2 pilot says

A lot has changed since NASA last sent astronauts to the moon — including the attitudes of those space explorers. That's the view of Victor Glover , the NASA astronaut who served as pilot on the Artemis 2 mission around the moon's far side this past April. "When you look back on the Apollo missions, there was a lot more competition back in the office. Everybody wanted to be the first, and then everybody wanted to be the next," Glover told Angels Broadcast Television on June 12, shortly before he threw out the first pitch before a baseball game between the Los Angeles Angels and the Tampa Bay Rays. "I think our office learned a lot from them," he added. "There are some good things about that. It makes you work really hard, but it also can create some unnecessary conflict. And so my office really wants to support everybody — wants you to be the guy that does it, and somebody just gets picked to do it, and that's OK." Glover and his Artemis 2 crewmates — NASA's Reid Wiseman and Christina Koch and Jeremy Hansen of the Canadian Space Agency — did indeed seem to forge a very strong bond during their training and their time in space. For example, shortly before Artemis 2's April 1 launch , Glover, Koch and Hansen came up with a plan to name a crater on the moon after Wiseman's wife Carroll, who died of cancer in 2020. …