The Artemis II crew flew quickly, finding a new patch: the Astronauts’ Mach 39 mark

NASA’s Artemis II crew are the fastest humans alive, and now he has a patch to prove it.

Mission Director Reid Wiseman, pilot Victor Glover, and mission specialists Christina Koch and Jeremy Hansen (the latter with the Canadian Space Agency) spent 10 days in early April flying by the Moon. Their journey took them far from Earth all the people went (52,756 kilometers (406,771 miles)) and then, on the way back and aboard the Orion spacecraft. Integritythey ran up to about 24,664 kilometers per hour (39,693 k/ph) re-entering the atmosphere.

Only three other people in history have traveled faster. NASA Apollo 10 astronauts Thomas Stafford, John Young, and Eugene Cernan set the record for the highest speed ever reached by a crew vehicle on Earth: 24,791 mph (39,897 kph) on May 26, 1969.

Cernan died in 2017, Young in 2018, and Stafford in 2024.

“The number we saw on the show – and I’m very much in agreement with what Orion thinks it’s going to do – was 38.89 Mach. But it depends on how you measure that number. It’s difficult how you measure it from space,” Glover said at a post-flight press conference at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston on April 16.

Mach, as a measure, compares the speed of an object to the speed of local sound. So the number changes depending on altitude, air temperature, and air volume. At sea level, 24,664 mph would be Mach 32, or 32 times the speed of sound.

By the time Artemis II reached its peak, the air was very thin and the temperature was colder than the ocean.

Mach 39

“There will be a new (Mach patch) coming out when we figure it out,” Glover said.

It took three weeks (including NASA time fabricator patch supplier, AB Emblem in Weaverville, North Carolina, to train crews) but the Mach 39 patch was revealed on Friday (June 5) in a video posted on social media by Wiseman. That is, if you pay attention to such things.