Artemis II splashdown
NASA’s Artemis II crew returned safely with a Pacific splashdown off San Diego in the last 48 hours — a milestone that was celebrated widely on NASA’s social accounts. (x.com) The return photo and posts drew heavy engagement across NASA feeds, signalling strong public interest in crewed lunar missions right now. (x.com)
A spacecraft coming home from the Moon does not land like an airplane. Orion slammed into Earth’s atmosphere at roughly 25,000 miles per hour, used its heat shield to survive plasma-hot reentry, and then dropped under parachutes into the Pacific at 5:07 p.m. Pacific Daylight Time on April 10, 2026. (nasa.gov) That capsule carried four people: NASA commander Reid Wiseman, NASA pilot Victor Glover, NASA mission specialist Christina Koch, and Canadian Space Agency mission specialist Jeremy Hansen. They splashed down off San Diego after a mission NASA says lasted nearly 10 days. (nasa.gov) Artemis II was not a Moon landing. It was the first crewed test of Orion, which is NASA’s deep-space capsule, on a trip around the Moon and back so engineers could see how the spacecraft, life-support systems, and recovery plan worked with people aboard. (nasa.gov) The mission also broke a record that had stood since Apollo 13 in 1970. NASA says the crew reached 248,655 miles from Earth on April 6, 2026, which made them the farthest humans have ever traveled from home. (nasa.gov) This flight mattered because Orion had already flown once without astronauts in 2022 on Artemis I. Artemis II added the hard part: four people inside the capsule during launch, deep-space operations, high-speed return, and ocean recovery. (nasa.gov) The spacecraft itself has a name now: Integrity. NASA used the mission to test how the crew lived and worked in a cabin built for beyond-Earth orbit, including return-to-Earth procedures after the spacecraft left the Moon’s gravitational pull on April 7. (nasa.gov) Splashdown was only the start of getting home. After Orion hit the water, recovery teams in inflatable boats approached the capsule, the astronauts exited onto a raft NASA calls the “front porch,” and then the ship USS John P. Murtha took over for the trip back to Naval Base San Diego. (nasa.gov) The crew list was historic on its own. Victor Glover became the first Black astronaut to travel to the Moon, Christina Koch became the first woman to travel to the Moon, and Jeremy Hansen became the first Canadian to do it. (nasa.gov) Now NASA has the data it wanted from the full trip: launch, lunar flyby, deep-space operations, reentry, parachutes, and recovery. The next big step in the program is Artemis III, which NASA says is planned as the mission that will try to land astronauts near the Moon’s south pole. (nasa.gov)
