The Baltimore Ravens were among the first to say “welcome home” to astronaut and longtime fan Reid Wiseman after his high-profile return from space Friday with his Artemis II crew — and they weren’t alone.

The Ravens resurfaced a Dec. 20, 2014 video of Wiseman addressing the team before they played the Houston Texans. It’s a full-circle moment that underscored the Cockeysville native’s deep ties to the Baltimore area and the meaning of team.

In the clip, Wiseman recalls a moment after a mission when he saw dozens of his NASA colleagues cheering in mission control.

“The camera pops on … and I’m not looking at one or two folks — I’m looking at a team of like 40 people,” he says. “That’s when it hit me … I’m this little, tiny piece at the top of the puzzle. The reason I’m alive is because all these people came together — not for glory, but for something bigger than themselves.”

Wiseman, who is an avid Ravens and Orioles fan, has even been spotted donning his team’s T-shirts in space and called Baltimore “a really great sports town.”

The Orioles also gave Wiseman a shoutout on his return to Earth, “Congratulations to Baltimore native Reid Wiseman and the rest of the Artemis II crew on their successful mission around the moon!”

Wiseman’s historic journey around the moon has been marked by deeply personal loss and tribute. During the mission, the crew proposed naming a lunar crater “Carroll” in honor of Wiseman’s late wife, who died in 2020 after a five-year battle with cancer.

The moment moved the crew to tears as they embraced inside the spacecraft, turning a milestone in space exploration into a remembrance of a woman who, by all accounts, dedicated her life to caring for others as a nurse. Wiseman’s daughters and his 83-year-old father were among those following the mission closely — a particularly poignant moment given his father’s wish to see his son make the journey.

Messages poured in from across the country, including from Gov. Wes Moore and President Donald Trump, as the Baltimore County native’s journey captured national attention from the locker room to lunar orbit.

And across the NFL, the space love spread: Philadelphia Eagles quarterback Jalen Hurts welcomed home Eagles fan and astronaut Christina Koch who has deep connections to Maryland as well and fixed the toilet during the Artemis II mission.

In the video, Hurts says: “Christina and the Artemis II crew, you are such an inspiration. Congratulations on making it back home. See you soon here in Philly. Go Birds!”

Before Koch made history as the first woman to venture into deep space, she spent formative years in Maryland, building both her career and community ties along the Chesapeake Bay. In the early 2000s, she lived in Eastport while working at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center and later at Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, where she contributed to space missions like Juno.

Outside of work, Koch was a competitive sailor with local associations, racing on the Severn River and becoming a familiar face in Annapolis’ tight-knit maritime community — friendships she has maintained even as her career took her from the South Pole to orbit and now deep space.

A known fan of the Philadelphia Eagles and Philadelphia Phillies, she’s been spotted repping both teams in space.

Artemis II’s astronauts closed out humanity’s first lunar voyage in more than half a century with a Pacific splashdown on Friday, blazing new records near the moon with grace and joy.

It was a dramatic grand finale to a mission that revealed not only swaths of the lunar far side never seen before by human eyes, but a total solar eclipse and a parade of planets, most notably our own shimmering Earth against the endless black void of space.

With their flight now complete, the four astronauts have set NASA up for a moon landing by another crew in just two years and a full-blown moon base within the decade.

NASA’s Mission Control erupted in celebration, with hundreds pouring in from the back support rooms. “We did it,” NASA’s Lori Glaze rejoiced at a news conference. “Welcome to our moonshot.”

Their Orion capsule, dubbed Integrity, made the entire plunge on automatic pilot. The lunar cruiser hit the atmosphere traveling Mach 33 — or 33 times the speed of sound — a blistering blur not seen since the 1960s and 1970s Apollo.

The tension in Mission Control mounted as the capsule became engulfed in red-hot plasma during peak heating and entered a planned communication blackout. All eyes were on the capsule’s life-protecting heat shield that had to withstand thousands of degrees during reentry.

Millions around the world watched the drama unfold, from the astronauts’ families huddled in Mission Control’s viewing room to hundreds packing into Dulaney High School in Baltimore County where Reid had attended, cheering when the capsule emerged from its six-minute blackout and again at splashdown.

While the world met Wiseman as the NASA astronaut commanding Artemis II, Adam Crowley, 50, met him as a freshman at Dulaney High School.

As Crowley tells it, though, not much has changed about the man, and that’s what makes this record-setting moment so special.

“It’s absolutely mind-boggling, but he’s the person you’d want to do it,” Crowley said. “He’s just at the highest level of excellence, but he’s brought such pure joy and excitement to the experience.”

Crowley added there is something special about “seeing your friend on top of that rocket.”

The triumphant moon-farers — commander Wiseman, pilot Victor Glover, Koch and Canada’s Jeremy Hansen — emerged from their bobbing capsule into the sunlight off the coast of San Diego.

Until Artemis II, NASA’s fresh-from-the-moon homecomings starred only white male pilots. Intent on reflecting changes in society, NASA chose a diverse, multinational crew for its lunar comeback.

Koch became the first woman to fly to the moon, Glover the first Black astronaut and Hansen the first non-U.S. citizen, bursting Canada with pride. They laughed, cried and hugged all the way there and back, striving to take the entire world along with them.

Banner reporters Darreonna Davis, Sara Ruberg and the Associated Press contributed to this story.