Texas, U.S. – The Artemis II capsule and its four-member crew streaked through Earth’s atmosphere and safely splashed down in the Pacific Ocean on Friday after nearly 10 days in space, capping the first voyage by humans to the vicinity of the moon in over half a century.
NASA’s gumdrop-shaped Orion capsule, dubbed Integrity, parachuted gently into calm seas off the Southern California coast shortly after 5:07 p.m. Pacific Time (0007 GMT on Saturday), concluding a mission that four days prior took the astronauts 252,000 miles away from Earth, deeper into space than anyone had flown before.
The Artemis II flight, traveling a total of 694,392 miles (1,117,515 km) in two Earth orbits and a climactic lunar flyby, was the debut crewed test flight in a series of Artemis missions that aim to return astronauts to the lunar surface starting in 2028.
‘Perfect bull’s eye’
The splashdown, under partly cloudy skies about two hours before sunset, was carried by live video feed in a NASA webcast. “A perfect bull’s eye splashdown for Integrity and its four astronauts,” NASA commentator Rob Navias said moments after the landing.
“We are stable one – four green crew members,” mission commander Reid Wiseman radioed just after splashdown, signaling the capsule was steady and that all four astronauts were in good shape.
It took NASA and U.S. Navy recovery teams less than two hours to secure the floating capsule and retrieve the four crew members – U.S. astronauts Wiseman, 50, Victor Glover, 49, and Christina Koch, 47, along with Canadian astronaut Jeremy Hansen, 50. NASA reported that a navy medical officer who briefly checked the astronauts aboard the capsule found them all to be healthy.
The crew’s homecoming cleared a critical final hurdle for the Lockheed Martin-built LMT.N Orion spacecraft, proving it would withstand the extreme forces of re-entry from a lunar-return trajectory.
It followed a white-knuckle, fiery plunge as Orion barreled into Earth’s atmosphere at nearly 33 times the speed of sound, generating frictional heat that sent temperatures on the capsule’s exterior soaring to some 5,000 degrees Fahrenheit (2,760 degrees Celsius). A plume of ionized gas from the intense heat and air compression enveloped the vehicle, causing a planned radio blackout of several minutes at the peak of re-entry stress.
The tension broke as contact was re-established and two sets of parachutes were seen billowing from the nose of the free-falling capsule, slowing its descent to about 15 mph (25 kph) before Orion gently hit the water.
Once Navy divers had attached a floating collar to stabilize the capsule, the four astronauts, still wearing their orange flight suits, were helped onto an inflatable raft. From there, they were hoisted one by one to helicopters hovering overhead and flown a short distance to nearby Navy amphibious transport vessel, the John P. Murtha, for further medical examination.
Glover and Koch smiled broadly and waved toward cameras as they sat on the edge of a helicopter door on the flight deck.
The crew was expected to spend the night aboard the ship and be flown on Saturday to Houston, where they will be reunited with family, NASA said.
