Artemis II pilot Victor Glover's daughter goes viral celebrating dad's moon mission
Victor Glover isn't just a regular dad, he's a cool dad.
The NASA astronaut is currently piloting the Orion spacecraft on the Artemis II lunar mission, and his daughter Maya L. Glover recently celebrated that accomplishment with a video that's since gone viral.
In a video posted Sunday on TikTok and Instagram, Maya Glover is seen unzipping a hooded sweatshirt to reveal a T-shirt printed with an image of her dad. She then steps back from the camera, dancing before playfully losing track of the moves.
"When your dad successfully pilots Artemis II halfway to the moon… & you forget the dance," she wrote over the clip, set to Korn's "Freak On a Leash."
The video quickly took off, racking up more than 9.3 million views and more than 1.7 million likes on TikTok alone, as of Monday.
In the caption, Maya Glover wrote, "Supra astra, ad lunam," Latin for "Above the stars, to the moon."
In a follow-up TikTok video on Monday, she encouraged viewers to leave comments for a chance to send messages to the crew.
Maya is a third-year architecture student at California Polytechnic State University and serves as president of the Xi Xi Chapter of Zeta Phi Beta Sorority Inc. on campus.
Victor Glover, a father of four daughters -- Genesis, Maya, Joia, and Corinne, according to NASA -- is the pilot of the four-person Artemis II crew, which also includes NASA astronauts Reid Wiseman (commander) and Christina Koch (mission specialist), as well as Canadian Space Agency astronaut Jeremy Hansen (mission specialist).
The mission launched April 1 at 6:35 p.m. ET from Kennedy Space Center in Florida and will travel roughly 685,000 miles over 10 days in a lunar flyby around the moon.
The Artemis II crew began their historic flyby around 2:45 p.m. ET on April 6, breaking the record for the farthest distance traveled by humans from Earth that same day.
The journey marks the first time astronauts have traveled around the moon in more than 50 years and is a key step toward NASA's goal of returning humans to the lunar surface and eventually establishing a long-term presence there.
