Artemis II splashdown

A moon mission does not end when the spacecraft turns for home. It ends when a capsule hits Earth’s air at about 25,000 miles per hour, survives a wall of plasma, opens parachutes in sequence, and lands upright in the Pacific Ocean. (nasa.gov) (usatoday.com) That is what NASA’s Orion spacecraft did at 8:07 p.m. Eastern on April 10, carrying Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, Christina Koch, and Canadian Space Agency astronaut Jeremy Hansen back from a lunar flyby off the California coast. (nasa.gov) Orion is the crew capsule, basically a deep-space lifeboat with seats, life support, computers, and a heat shield on the bottom. Artemis II was its first flight with people aboard, which made the return through the atmosphere the part NASA had to get right in the real world, not just in simulations. (nasa.gov 1) (nasa.gov 2) The rocket that sent Orion out there was the Space Launch System, which is NASA’s heavy-lift launcher for missions too big for ordinary Earth orbit. NASA says it is the only rocket that can send Orion, astronauts, and cargo directly toward the Moon in a single launch. (nasa.gov) Artemis II lifted off from Launch Complex 39B at Kennedy Space Center in Florida at 6:35 p.m. Eastern on April 1. The crew then spent about 10 days checking spacecraft systems, flying around the Moon, and heading back on a path designed to test the hardware future lunar crews will depend on. (nasa.gov 1) (nasa.gov 2) The crew was four people because this was not a landing mission. Wiseman served as commander, Glover as pilot, Koch as mission specialist, and Hansen as mission specialist representing Canada on the first crewed Artemis flight. (nasa.gov) NASA built this mission as a shakedown cruise for deep space, the way an airline tests a new jet before filling it with passengers on routine routes. The agency says Artemis II was meant to verify Orion, the Space Launch System rocket, ground systems, and crew procedures before later missions try lunar surface operations. (nasa.gov 1) (nasa.gov 2) The return was the sharpest test because Earth’s atmosphere works like a brake pad and a blowtorch at the same time. As Orion slammed into thicker air, friction and compression heated the spacecraft enough that its heat shield had to absorb and shed enormous energy before parachutes could take over. (usatoday.com) (cnbc.com) After splashdown, recovery boats moved in, the astronauts climbed out onto an inflatable platform called the “front porch,” and helicopters carried them to the USS John P. Murtha. NASA said the crew then went to the ship’s medical bay before heading back to shore and then to Johnson Space Center in Houston. (nasa.gov) NASA lists the mission duration as 9 days, 1 hour, and 32 minutes. That made Artemis II the first crewed trip beyond low Earth orbit in more than 50 years and the first time since the Apollo era that humans had flown around the Moon and returned. (nasa.gov) (nasa.gov) The next step is not another flyby for its own sake. NASA is using the data from this flight to decide how confidently it can send later Artemis crews closer to the lunar surface, and eventually use the same Moon-tested systems for longer missions aimed at Mars. (nasa.gov)