Trump to Award Artemis II the Congressional Space Medal

President Donald Trump will award the Congressional Space Medal of Honor to NASA’s Artemis II crew at 11 a.m. EDT Friday at Johnson Space Center in Houston. The four astronauts flew around the Moon in April on Orion, the first people to leave Earth orbit since 1972.

NASA’s published roll of the medal still names only 30 astronauts, and 17 of those awards were given after they died. Friday adds a living Canadian to a list that, until now, had one foreign name, and he was already gone.

Friday’s Ceremony Is at Johnson Space Center

NASA said in a media advisory dated Aug. 21 that Trump will present the medal to commander Reid Wiseman, pilot Victor Glover, and mission specialists Christina Koch and Jeremy Hansen. NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman will stand with them for the Friday ceremony at Johnson, the Houston campus where US crews have trained since Gemini.

The agency told viewers to watch on nasa.gov/live. NASA also posted the plan itself.

https://x.com/NASA/status/2090857345525936606

The four already sat with Trump in the Oval Office on April 29, a little more than two weeks after splashdown. Friday moves the same group from a White House photo into the hall where the astronaut office actually lives.

CollectSPACE reported that Isaacman told NASA staff in an Aug. 21 email there were “no greater ambassadors to the stars than Reid, Victor, Christina, and Jeremy,” and that they had represented “NASA and their nations” from selection through splashdown. The plural is doing work. One of those nations is Canada.

Only 30 Astronauts Have Ever Received It

Congress created the medal in 1969. NASA’s history office is plain about who actually hands it over. The president presents it in the name of Congress, and the NASA administrator makes the formal nomination. The president may award the medal to an astronaut who, in the performance of those duties, has made “exceptionally meritorious efforts and contributions to the welfare of the Nation and of mankind,” in the wording NASA still posts.

Jimmy Carter gave the first six on Oct. 1, 1978. Neil Armstrong was in that group for Apollo 11. So was Alan Shepard, John Glenn, Pete Conrad, Gus Grissom, and Frank Borman, who had commanded Apollo 8, the first crew to orbit the Moon. NASA’s list of 30 awardees still stops at Robert Behnken, who received it with Douglas Hurley on Jan. 31, 2023.

George W. Bush awarded the medal more than any other president, 16 times. Fourteen of those were for the Challenger and Columbia crews. NASA’s roster marks 17 awards with an asterisk for a posthumous gift, counting Apollo 1, both destroyed shuttles, and Ramon, the Israeli payload specialist who died on Columbia. Between Crippen in 2006 and Hurley and Behnken in 2023, the list is blank.

Apollo 8 is the closest cousin to Artemis II, a crew that went around the Moon and came home without landing. Of those three men, only Borman is on the medal roll for that flight. James Lovell received his in 1995, tied to Apollo 13. William Anders is not on NASA’s list at all. Friday’s plan is to pin the same honor on every seat in Orion, four months after the hatch opened in the Pacific.

The April Flight That Broke Apollo 13’s Record

Artemis II lifted off April 1 from Launch Complex 39B at Kennedy Space Center on the Space Launch System, NASA’s heavy Moon rocket. The crew named the Orion capsule Integrity. They were the first people to fly that ship, and the first to travel beyond the Moon in more than 50 years.

At the farthest point they reached 252,756 miles from Earth, NASA’s Johnson recap says, past the 248,655-mile mark Apollo 13 set in 1970. Canadian astronaut Jeremy Hansen, speaking for the crew as they passed the old record, told the ground they wanted the next generation to beat it. The previous holders never planned to own that number. Apollo 13 swung wide after an oxygen-tank failure, and Fred Haise later joked that someone had felt sorry for them.

1. April 1, 2026: SLS sends Orion off Pad 39B at Kennedy, the first crewed use of both the rocket and the capsule.
2. April 2, 2026: A translunar injection burn puts Integrity on a free-return path around the Moon, and the crew photographs Earth through the windows, auroras and all.
3. April 6, 2026: The ship passes behind the Moon, loses contact for about 40 minutes, then captures an Earthset at 5:41 p.m. CDT and a solar eclipse from lunar distance. Closest approach to the surface, in later mission reports, is 4,067 miles.
4. April 10, 2026: Integrity splashes down in the Pacific off San Diego. Navy crews recover Wiseman, Glover, Koch, and Hansen and fly them to USS John P. Murtha.

NASA clocked the outbound-and-home path at 694,481 miles and the mission at a little more than nine days, though the agency still calls it a 10-day flight in the medal advisory. Koch held up a plush zero-gravity marker named Rise, chosen from more than 2,600 designs and shaped as a nod to Apollo 8’s Earthrise. On the far side they shot the Milky Way through the windows. They also became, on the same loop, the first woman, the first Black astronaut, and the first Canadian to travel around the Moon.

After splashdown, Isaacman was already on the recovery ship. A NASA statement issued in his name thanked Trump and Congress for the money and the mandate that put the crew out there, and told the four, “welcome home.”

A Canadian Will Stand With Ilan Ramon

Hansen is a colonel in the Royal Canadian Air Force, a former CF-18 pilot, and a Canadian Space Agency astronaut selected in 2009. Artemis II was his first spaceflight, and it made him the first Canadian on a lunar mission and the first non-American to leave Earth orbit. He is 50. He grew up on a farm near London, Ontario, and in 2017 became the first Canadian to lead a NASA astronaut class.

On NASA’s medal list, the only name that is not American is Ilan Ramon. Bush awarded that one on Feb. 3, 2004, after Columbia broke up. Hansen will be the second foreign recipient, and the first who can walk onto the stage and take the ribbon in his own hands.

Colonel Jeremy Hansen made history as the first Canadian to take part in a lunar mission, an achievement that has inspired every generation of Canadian.

Mélanie Joly, Minister of Industry, Government of Canada statement, July 6, 2026

That same July statement said Hansen will leave active CSA duty in September and keep serving as an RCAF reservist. “My deepest gratitude to the Canadian Armed Forces, the Canadian Space Agency, and the people of Canada for the opportunity to serve the past 32 years,” he said. Friday’s medal lands in the last weeks of that chapter.

A lot of the US talk around the ceremony still treats the crew as a four-person American honor roll. That is sloppy. One seat on Integrity was a Canadian seat, bargained for over years of partnership, and the medal law does not require a US passport. The American conversation keeps dropping the passport anyway.

New Spacecraft Firsts Keep Drawing This Medal

Read NASA’s roster in order and a pattern shows up. The medal keeps going to people who opened a vehicle or an era, not only to people who died in one.

WHEN THE MEDAL HAS MARKED A FIRST

• Apollo 8, 1978: Borman is honored as commander of the first lunar orbit, a decade after the flight, and his two crewmates are not.
• STS-1, 1981 and 2006: Young, the commander of the first shuttle, receives it from Reagan. Crippen, the pilot on the same flight, waits 25 years for Bush to match it.
• ISS Expedition 1, 2003: William Shepherd is honored as the first commander of the International Space Station.
• Crew Dragon Demo-2, 2023: Hurley and Behnken both receive it from Biden for the first NASA crew to orbit on a commercial ship, 17 years after the previous living award.
• Orion Artemis II, 2026: Trump is set to give it to all four on the first crewed Orion, including the first living foreign recipient.

SpaceNews noted in 2023 that the Hurley and Behnken awards surprised some people in the field, in part because NASA announced them less than a day before the ceremony and did not say whether more would follow. Artemis II is the next first-of-ship crew. The difference is speed and width. Carter waited until 1978 to honor Borman. Reagan honored one of two STS-1 pilots, and the second man waited until 2006. Biden honored both Demo-2 pilots together. Trump is honoring a four-person lunar flyby together, in the same calendar year as the flight.

That does not make the April loop small. It does mean the medal is being used the way a service uses a campaign decoration at the start of a new ship class, rather than the way it was used for Armstrong, or for the 17 names with asterisks.

Isaacman Sent Four Names to the President

Isaacman is NASA’s 15th administrator. A US district judge swore him in on Dec. 18, 2025, at the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, the day after the Senate confirmed him 67-30. He is a commercial astronaut and a former commander of Inspiration4, the first orbital flight with no professional crew. The medal he is now nominating has never gone to a private customer flight. It is about to go to the government crew that flew NASA’s own capsule around the Moon.

NASA’s own rules put his signature on the paperwork. Formal nominations on behalf of the agency come from the administrator to the president. Wiseman, Glover, Koch, and Hansen were selected for the medal by Trump after Isaacman recommended them, NASA and later news accounts agree. Biden used the same channel for Hurley and Behnken. The politics change. The form does not.

The December order that accompanied Isaacman’s swearing-in, as SpaceNews later described it, told NASA to land astronauts on the Moon by 2028 and to put early pieces of a lunar outpost in place by 2030. Artemis II did not land. It tested Orion with people on board, including the heat shield and the re-entry path, on a free-return loop that never needed a lunar-orbit insertion burn. The medal is for that test, and for the distance record, and for the fact that a woman, a Black pilot, and a Canadian officer were on the flight deck when the Earth got small.

Johnson Space Center on Friday is where those four will stand while a president who already hosted them in April puts a rare ribbon on a crew that has not yet walked on the Moon. NASA’s list will move from 30 names to 34. Seventeen of the old names never heard their citations read. Hansen will. So will Wiseman, Glover, and Koch, four months after Integrity hit the Pacific at 5:07 p.m. PDT on April 10.

The stream opens at 11 a.m. EDT. The medal they are about to wear is the same design Carter hung on Armstrong in 1978, and the same one Bush hung on Ramon after Columbia. The room, this time, is full of people who came home.