The Artemis II crew — NASA astronauts Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, and Christina Koch, plus Canadian Space Agency astronaut Jeremy Hansen — splashed down in an Orion space capsule Friday, ending a nine-day trip around the moon and back. Not a long headline journey on paper, but a huge one for getting humans deeper into space than ever before.
Coming home wasn’t just “re-entry” in the calm sense. To get safely through the atmosphere, the crew and capsule had to take on near-record-breaking entry speeds and temperatures up to 5,000 degrees Fahrenheit. Orion spent 13 and a half minutes falling through the atmosphere, reaching a top speed of more than 30 times the speed of sound. The heat shield did its job, and then a series of parachutes slowed everything down enough for the capsule to gently splash down in the Pacific Ocean off the coast of San Diego.
Four members of the U.S. Navy Dive team pulled the crew from the capsule. Helicopters then plucked them from a raft outside their spacecraft — called the porch — and, within 24 hours of splashdown, they were set to arrive at the Johnson Space Center in Houston. Within the quiet blur of that recovery rhythm, the details matter: the parachute deployment, the capsule’s performance, how the crew’s systems held up under stress. Even the ocean landing has a kind of sensory story—when the capsule hit, there was that brief moment of wet silence before everything got loud again.
Misryoum newsroom reported that the mission clocked more than 700,237 statute miles, according to Artemis II entry flight director Rick Henfling. The flight path took the crew around the far side of the moon at around 4,000 miles above the surface. They used the vantage point for geological observations and took thousands of photos to help scientists understand what the moon is made of—and where it might have come from. But the crew also described the emotional perspective of seeing Earth as an oasis in a vast, empty backdrop.
The Artemis II mission is also, at its core, a test flight—an important one—for Orion. The spacecraft that returns people from lunar missions has to work through the hard parts: life support, maneuverability, the heat shield, the toilet, basically everything that has to keep a crew alive and functioning when physics gets unfriendly. “Orion performed as designed,” Misryoum editorial desk noted, and what NASA learns from this flight is meant to set future lunar missions up for success.
And now the relay race angle kicks in. “We did it,” NASA’s Lori Glaze said, leading the Artemis programs, framing it as sending four people to the moon and safely bringing them back for the first time in more than 50 years. Koch talked about the crew’s ethos as a relay—symbolized by batons meant to be handed to the next team. That next crew may not be far off, because NASA is already building toward what comes after Artemis II.
Even before Artemis II splashed down, Misryoum newsroom reported that work had started at Kennedy Space Center in Florida for the next mission. NASA engineering operations manager John Giles oversees the Crawler-Transporter, the massive vehicle that moves the mobile launch pad, and the SLS rocket that launches Orion. His team is preparing to move the launch platform for Artemis II back into the Vehicle Assembly Building next week to begin putting together the rocket for Artemis III. A key part of the Artemis III SLS rocket—its core stage fuel tank—is heading to Kennedy later this month, while parts of the solid rocket motors are already there.
Artemis III aims to launch next year, staying in Earth orbit to test spacecraft designed to land humans on the moon. Then Artemis IV could bring humans to the lunar surface for the first time since 1972. Somewhere between the adrenaline of a successful splashdown and the hum of assembly plans, it’s easy to feel how fast the program keeps moving—almost like the universe of deadlines is its own kind of nothingness, and the work is the only light.
Alzheimer’s ‘gamechanger’ anti-amyloid drugs labeled trivial, review says
Smithsonian secrets most likely to blow your mind
When a naked mole rat queen dies, that usually means war—but not for this colony