Artemis II splashdown
NASA’s Artemis II crew completed a high‑profile return to Earth after a roughly 10‑day lunar orbit, a splashdown event that dominated social coverage yesterday. (x.com) The homecoming still looked dramatic in public posts — including a playful Cookie Monster welcome — which underlines how lunar missions are back in mainstream travel and science conversations. (x.com)
A moon mission still ends the old-fashioned way: by hitting the ocean at thousands of miles per hour inside a capsule wrapped in plasma. NASA’s Orion spacecraft splashed down in the Pacific near San Diego at 5:07 p.m. Pacific time on Friday, April 10, 2026, bringing Artemis II’s four astronauts home. (nasa.gov) That crew was Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, Christina Koch, and Jeremy Hansen. Hansen flew as part of the Canadian Space Agency, which made Artemis II an international crewed trip around the Moon rather than a United States-only mission. (nasa.gov) Splashdown is not a stunt ending bolted onto the mission. Orion comes back so fast that NASA uses Earth’s atmosphere like a stone skipping across water, bleeding off speed before parachutes open and recovery ships move in. (nasa.gov) Artemis II was the first time astronauts went to the Moon since Apollo 17 in December 1972. NASA describes it as the first crewed lunar flyby in more than 50 years, which is why a simple ocean landing turned into a global live event. (nasa.gov) The mission launched on April 1, 2026, and lasted 9 days, 1 hour, and 32 minutes. During that trip, Orion looped around the Moon instead of landing, because this flight was built to test the spacecraft and its life-support systems with people on board. (nasa.gov) On April 6, the crew reached 248,655 miles from Earth, which NASA said was farther than any humans had ever traveled before. That pushed past the Apollo 13 distance record from 1970 by taking Orion deeper into space before it curved back home. (nasa.gov) The closest pass to the Moon was about 4,070 miles above the surface. That is far higher than a landing approach, but close enough for the crew to photograph the lunar far side and a crescent Earth hanging over the Moon’s edge. (nasa.gov 1) (nasa.gov 2) The hardware mattered as much as the astronauts. Artemis II was the first crewed flight of the Space Launch System rocket and Orion spacecraft together, which is NASA’s new deep-space combination for later Moon landing missions. (nasa.gov 1) (nasa.gov 2) After splashdown, U.S. Navy and U.S. Air Force teams worked with NASA to bring the capsule and crew aboard the USS John P. Murtha. That recovery step is part of the test too, because getting astronauts out safely after reentry is the last job the mission has to finish. (nasa.gov)
