Artemis II splashdown

A spacecraft coming home from the Moon does not land like an airplane. NASA’s Orion capsule hit Earth’s atmosphere at nearly 24,000 miles per hour on April 10, then slowed under parachutes before splashing down in the Pacific Ocean off California. (nasa.gov) The four people inside were Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, Christina Koch, and Jeremy Hansen. They spent 10 days on Artemis II, which launched on April 1 and became the first crewed trip around the Moon since Apollo 17 in 1972. (nasa.gov) This was not a Moon landing mission. Orion flew a lunar flyby, which means it used the Moon’s gravity like a slingshot, looped around the far side, and headed back to Earth without touching the surface. (nasa.gov) The far side is the half of the Moon that never faces Earth. When Orion passed behind it on April 6, the crew lost contact with Earth for about 40 minutes because the Moon itself blocked the radio signal. (nasa.gov) A few minutes before that blackout, the crew reached 248,655 miles from Earth at 1:56 p.m. Eastern time. NASA said that beat the previous human-distance record set by Apollo 13 in 1970. (nasa.gov) The point of Artemis II was to test the full deep-space system with people on board. NASA used the flight to prove its Space Launch System rocket, its Orion spacecraft, and its mission operations could carry astronauts beyond low Earth orbit and bring them back alive. (nasa.gov) Low Earth orbit is the neighborhood where the International Space Station circles, a few hundred miles up. Artemis II went vastly farther, covering more than 800,000 kilometers on a route that left Earth orbit, swung around the Moon, and returned on a free-return path designed to bring the crew home even if major systems failed. (nasaspaceflight.com) (nasa.gov) The capsule’s hardest job came at the very end. Re-entry heated Orion’s outer surface to extreme temperatures, so the heat shield had to work like the ceramic lining inside a furnace while the spacecraft plunged back through the atmosphere. (nbcnews.com) (nasa.gov) Now NASA has the one thing it could not get from an uncrewed test: data from four humans living, working, sleeping, and flying inside Orion for a full lunar mission. That is the step between Artemis I, which flew without astronauts in 2022, and Artemis III, which NASA says is meant to put astronauts near the Moon’s south pole. (nasa.gov 1) (nasa.gov 2) So the splashdown was not the end of a stunt. It was the first time in more than half a century that astronauts went out to the Moon and came all the way back, and NASA now has a flown lunar crew vehicle, a tested return profile, and a mission record that reached farther from Earth than any humans before it. (nasa.gov 1) (nasa.gov 2)