Artemis II nears splashdown

The hard part of a Moon mission is not getting there. The hard part is coming home fast enough to hit a patch of ocean the size of a city after 10 days and roughly 685,000 miles in space. (nasa.gov) Artemis II is NASA’s first crewed lunar flight since Apollo 17 in December 1972, and it put four people inside the Orion spacecraft instead of landing them on the surface. Orion is the crew capsule, like the command cabin on Apollo, and this flight was built to prove it can keep astronauts alive far beyond low Earth orbit. (nasa.gov) The crew is Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, Christina Koch, and Jeremy Hansen of the Canadian Space Agency. They launched from Kennedy Space Center in Florida at 6:35 p.m. Eastern on April 1 aboard the Space Launch System, NASA’s 32-story Moon rocket. (nasa.gov) A lunar flyby works like throwing a ball past a moving train so the train’s gravity bends the path and sends it back. Artemis II used the Moon that way, looping around the far side instead of firing engines for a landing. (abcnews.com) On April 6 at 1:56 p.m. Eastern, the crew reached 248,655 miles from Earth and passed the distance record set by Apollo 13 in 1970. NASA said that made Artemis II the farthest human spaceflight ever flown. (nasa.gov) The spacecraft then spent about seven hours in its closest pass around the Moon and sent back views of the lunar far side and Earth hanging in black space. NASA called it humanity’s first return to the Moon since Apollo 17, because no people had gone that far from Earth in the 53 years between those missions. (nasa.gov) Now the mission has narrowed to heat, speed, and angle. NASA’s live coverage says splashdown is scheduled for about 8:07 p.m. Eastern on Friday, April 10, off the coast of San Diego, after final return-correction burns lined Orion up for reentry. (nasa.gov) Reentry is the moment the capsule slams into the atmosphere at lunar-return speed, which is much faster than a trip back from the International Space Station. ABC’s live briefing said NASA was tracking the final descent closely because this phase puts the heat shield, parachutes, and recovery timeline under the most stress. (abcnews.com) This flight was never meant to plant a flag. It was meant to test the Orion life-support systems, navigation, communications, and recovery procedures with actual people aboard before Artemis III tries to send astronauts to the lunar surface. (nasa.gov) If Orion hits the water where planned and the crew comes out healthy, NASA will have checked off the first crewed deep-space rehearsal of the Artemis program. The next question stops being whether the rocket and capsule can circle the Moon with people inside, and becomes whether NASA can turn that loop into a landing. (nasa.gov)