Artemis II splashdown

A spacecraft coming home from the Moon does not land like an airplane. Artemis II’s Orion capsule hit Earth’s atmosphere at about 25,000 miles per hour, used a heat shield to survive the plasma outside, and then slowed under parachutes before splashing down in the Pacific at 8:07 p.m. Eastern on April 10, 2026. (nasa.gov) That kind of return is the hard part of a lunar mission. Low Earth orbit is like circling your neighborhood block, but the Moon is roughly 238,000 miles away, so the spacecraft has to come back much faster and hotter than crews returning from the International Space Station. (nasa.gov) Artemis II was NASA’s first crewed lunar flyby in more than 50 years. The four people inside were Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, Christina Koch, and Jeremy Hansen of the Canadian Space Agency, and they launched on April 1, 2026 for a mission NASA lists at 9 days, 1 hour, and 32 minutes. (nasa.gov) The mission did not try to land on the Moon. Orion looped around the Moon’s far side and came back so NASA could test the spacecraft, life-support hardware, navigation, communications, and crew operations before putting astronauts into lunar orbit and eventually onto the surface. (nasa.gov) On April 6, the crew reached 248,655 miles from Earth, which NASA said was farther than any humans had ever traveled. That pushed past the distance record set by Apollo 13 in 1970. (nasa.gov) The last hours looked simple on screen because most of the dangerous work had already been planned down to the second. NASA said Orion fired its thrusters for 8 seconds at 2:53 p.m. Eastern on April 10, changing its speed by 4.2 feet per second to line up the final path home. (nasa.gov) Then the spacecraft had to turn itself into the right attitude for re-entry, separate the crew module from the service module, and let the small cone-shaped capsule take the heat alone. NASA’s live coverage of the return began at 6:30 p.m. Eastern on NASA Plus, the agency’s streaming service. (nasa.gov) After splashdown, recovery teams moved in with divers, small boats, helicopters, and a Navy ship off the California coast. NASA said the crew landed near San Diego and was flown by helicopter to the recovery ship after the capsule was secured. (nasa.gov) (apnews.com) This flight was the dress rehearsal for the part of the Artemis program that comes next. Artemis III is the mission NASA plans to use to land astronauts near the Moon’s south pole, and Artemis II was the proof that the rocket, the capsule, and the people inside can make the round trip alive. (nasa.gov)