Nell Greenfield Boyce

NPR News.

While talking to reporters from space, astronaut Victor Glover said he'd been thinking about the return to Earth ever since he was assigned to this mission a few years ago.

He said he hadn't even begun to process everything that they'd seen and done.

NASA officials have calculated that during re-entry, the capsule's maximum speed will be nearly 24,000 miles per hour.

That's really fast, but won't top the re-entry speed record set by the returning Apollo 10 astronauts in 1969.

Nell Greenfield-Boyce, NPR News.

With the Orion spacecraft now on the trajectory that will take it around the moon and back, the crew has more time to rest.

The four astronauts finally got to talk to their families back on the ground.

And they've been taking pictures.

Howard Hugh is the Orion program manager at NASA.

He says his favorite photo so far shows the inside of the spacecraft and one of its windows.

The astronauts have plenty of cameras on board, so there's more pictures to come, especially during their closest approach to the moon on Monday.

Nell Greenfield-Boyce, NPR News.

The rocket is just arcing up into the sky.

There's a tremendous noise and just a bright, bright star-like, streaking star in the sky as it goes up and up.

The sound was like physical.

You could feel your body shaking.

And there's a long, straight cloud, white cloud coming down from the rocket, which is still

Very visible, high up in the blue sky.

There's four astronauts on board, and it's amazing to think that they're on top of this thing.