Artemis II splashdown

A moon mission does not end when the spacecraft gets home. It ends when a capsule moving about 25,000 miles per hour hits the top of Earth’s atmosphere, survives a wall of heat, opens parachutes in sequence, and lands close enough for Navy crews to fish four astronauts out of the Pacific. (nasa.gov) That is what happened on April 10 at 8:07 p.m. Eastern time, when Orion splashed down off San Diego after Artemis II, NASA’s first crewed trip around the Moon since Apollo 17 in December 1972. The crew was Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, Christina Koch, and Canadian Space Agency astronaut Jeremy Hansen. (nasa.gov) Artemis II launched on April 1, 2026, and lasted 9 days, 1 hour, and 32 minutes. NASA designed it as a full dress rehearsal for later Moon missions, using the Space Launch System rocket and the Orion spacecraft on their first crewed deep-space flight together. (nasa.gov) The mission’s job was not to land on the Moon. The mission’s job was to take people around it, test life-support systems, navigation, communications, and crew operations far beyond low Earth orbit, then bring them back alive. (nasa.gov) By April 6, the crew had reached 248,655 miles from Earth, which NASA said beat the distance record set by Apollo 13 in 1970. That made Artemis II not just a symbolic return to lunar flight, but the farthest humans have ever traveled from Earth. (nasa.gov) The hardest part came at the very end because the capsule had to bleed off lunar-return speed without burning through. NASA used a “skip entry” profile, which works like a flat stone skimming across water: Orion dipped into the atmosphere, climbed slightly, and then came back down to spread heat and force over a longer path. (nasa.gov) That reentry profile mattered even more because Orion’s heat shield had been under scrutiny since Artemis I in 2022, when engineers found unexpected cracking and material loss after the uncrewed return. For Artemis II, NASA kept the same basic shield design but changed the way the capsule came in, saying analysis and Artemis I data showed the crew could return safely. (cbsnews.com) After splashdown, NASA did not open the hatch right away. Recovery teams first checked for toxic vapors, attached lines to stabilize the capsule, and moved the astronauts onto an inflatable platform called the “front porch” before helicopter lifts took them to the USS John P. Murtha. (nasa.gov) The ship waiting offshore was not a random choice. The USS John P. Murtha is a Navy amphibious transport dock based in San Diego, and the Navy had been assigned to recover Orion and its crew as part of the mission’s final test of real-world landing operations. (navy.mil) Artemis II also changed who gets to be first in this new Moon era. Victor Glover became the first Black astronaut to travel beyond low Earth orbit, Christina Koch became the first woman to do it, and Jeremy Hansen became the first Canadian to fly to the Moon’s vicinity. (nasa.gov) Now the program moves to the part NASA actually wants: sending astronauts from orbit to the lunar surface. Artemis II proved the transportation loop first — launch, deep-space cruise, lunar flyby, reentry, splashdown, and recovery — so the next missions can add landing hardware on top of a system that has now brought a crew home from the Moon. (nasa.gov)