Artemis II back in Houston

The Artemis II crew is back in Houston after the first crewed trip around the Moon in more than 50 years. NASA welcomed Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, Christina Koch and Jeremy Hansen home at Johnson Space Center on April 11. (nasa.gov) NASA streamed the Houston arrival as a public event on NASA Plus, listing it for 4 p.m. on April 11. The agency said the astronauts were returning after a “historic journey around the Moon.” (plus.nasa.gov) The mission launched from Kennedy Space Center in Florida at 6:35 p.m. Eastern time on April 1 and ended with a Pacific splashdown at 8:07 p.m. Eastern time on April 10. NASA says the flight lasted 9 days, 1 hour and 32 minutes. (nasa.gov; nasa.gov) Artemis II was a lunar flyby, not a landing mission. NASA says Orion carried the crew around the Moon to test the spacecraft, life-support systems and deep-space operations before later Artemis missions attempt landings near the lunar south pole. (nasa.gov) The four-person crew also marked several firsts in the program. Glover became the first Black astronaut to travel to the Moon, Koch became the first woman, and Hansen became the first Canadian. (nasa.gov) NASA says the astronauts traveled farther from Earth than any humans before them, reaching a maximum distance of 252,760 miles from Earth. The agency’s Artemis II mission page lists the total trip at 695,081 miles. (nasa.gov; nasa.gov) Before re-entry, Orion completed return trajectory correction burns and handed communications from NASA’s Deep Space Network to its near-Earth relay system for the final leg home. After splashdown, NASA, Navy and Air Force recovery teams extracted the crew and brought them to the USS John P. Murtha. (nasa.gov; nasa.gov) NASA has described Artemis II as the first crewed test flight of its Artemis program, the campaign meant to return astronauts to the Moon and build toward longer-term missions there. Back in Houston, the public welcome shifted the mission from flight operations to post-flight debriefs and the next round of lunar planning. (nasa.gov; nasa.gov)