The Artemis II capsule and its four-member crew streaked through Earth’s atmosphere and safely splashed down in the Pacific Ocean on Friday after nearly 10 days in space, capping the first voyage by humans to the moon in over half a century.
NASA’s gumdrop-shaped Orion capsule, dubbed Integrity, parachuted gently into calm seas off the southern California coast shortly after 5 p.m. PT, concluding a mission that took the astronauts deeper into space than anyone had flown before.
The Artemis II flight, traveling a total of 694,392 miles (1,117,515 km) across two Earth orbits and a climactic lunar flyby some 252,000 miles away, was the debut crewed test flight in a series of Artemis missions that aim to return astronauts to the lunar surface starting in 2028.
The splashdown, about two hours before sunset, was carried by live video feed in a NASA webcast. “A perfect bull’s eye splashdown for Integrity and its four astronauts,” NASA commentator Rob Navias said moments after the landing.
Recovery teams were standing by to secure the floating capsule and retrieve the crew – U.S. astronauts Reid Wiseman, 50, Victor Glover, 49, and Christina Koch, 47, along with Canadian astronaut Jeremy Hansen, 50.
“We got a great view of the moon out window 2 – looks a little smaller than yesterday,” Wiseman, mission commander, radioed to mission control in Houston minutes before the crew dove into Earth’s atmosphere.
“Guess we’ll have to go back,” mission control replied.
The crew’s homecoming cleared a critical final hurdle for the Lockheed Martin-built Orion spacecraft, proving it would withstand the extreme forces of re-entry from a lunar-return trajectory.
It followed a white-knuckle, 13-minute fiery plunge through Earth’s atmosphere, generating frictional heat that sent temperatures on the capsule’s exterior soaring to some 5,000 degrees Fahrenheit (2,760 degrees Celsius).
At the peak of re-entry stress, as expected, intense heat and air compression formed a red-hot sheath of ionized gas, or plasma, that engulfed the capsule, cutting off radio communications with the crew for several minutes.
The tension broke as contact was re-established and two sets of parachutes were seen billowing from the nose of the free-falling capsule, slowing its descent to about 15 mph (25 kph) before Orion gently hit the water.
It was expected to take NASA and U.S. Navy teams about an hour to secure the floating capsule, assist the four astronauts out of the vehicle, hoist them into helicopters hovering overhead and fly them to a nearby Navy ship, the USS John P. Murtha, to undergo an initial medical checkup.
The crew was expected to spend the night aboard the vessel and be flown on Saturday to Houston, where they would be reunited with family.
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