After 10 days, 695,081 miles, and a fiery plunge through Earth’s atmosphere, the four astronauts of NASA’s Artemis II mission are safely back on Earth. The Orion spacecraft, named Integrity, splashed down in the Pacific Ocean off the coast of San Diego at 8:07 p.m. ET on Friday, April 10, completing the first crewed lunar mission in more than half a century.
NASA mission control marked the moment with a simple announcement that landed with enormous weight. Integrity’s astronauts were back on Earth, and a new chapter in human space exploration had officially begun.
A textbook return from deep space
The reentry began at 7:53 p.m. ET when the Orion spacecraft hit Earth’s atmosphere 400,000 feet above the planet’s surface, traveling at more than 24,000 mph, roughly 35 times the speed of sound. A planned six-minute communications blackout followed as plasma built up around the capsule during peak heating, pushing temperatures on the heat shield above 5,000 degrees Fahrenheit.
When communications were restored at 8:00 p.m. ET, Commander Reid Wiseman’s voice came through clearly. Houston, Integrity, we have you loud and clear. Cheers broke out across the mission control viewing room.
Drogue parachutes deployed at 23,400 feet, slowing the spacecraft and stabilizing its descent. At 5,400 feet, three main parachutes took over, reducing velocity to under 200 feet per second for a smooth final approach. Splashdown came right on schedule, and NASA officials described it as a perfect bull’s-eye.
The crew is in excellent shape
Before the capsule hit the water, Commander Wiseman reported four green crew members aboard, confirming that everyone was in excellent condition after the intense reentry. About an hour after splashdown, recovery teams opened the hatch and extracted all four astronauts one by one. They stepped out onto an inflatable raft known as the front porch and took their first breaths of fresh Pacific air since launching on April 1.
From there, Navy helicopters hoisted the crew up and transported them to the USS John P. Murtha, where they underwent post-mission medical evaluations. They are scheduled to board a NASA aircraft bound for Johnson Space Center in Houston.
The four crew members, NASA commander Reid Wiseman, pilot Victor Glover, mission specialist Christina Koch, and Canadian Space Agency mission specialist Jeremy Hansen, spent nearly 10 days in deep space and set a new record for the farthest distance from Earth traveled by humans. On Monday’s seven-hour lunar flyby, they reached 252,756 miles from Earth, surpassing the previous mark set by Apollo 13 in 1970.
NASA says the path to the moon is open
At a post-splashdown press conference, NASA officials made clear that Artemis II was not the destination. It was the beginning.
Howard Hu, NASA Orion program manager, called the successful return the start of a new era of human space exploration. Amit Kshatriya, associate NASA administrator, said the mission proved that the path to the lunar surface is now open, adding that 53 years ago humanity left the moon and this time they returned to stay.
Lori Glaze, acting associate administrator for NASA’s Exploration Systems Development Mission Directorate, summed it up simply. We did it.
NASA plans to land a crew on the surface of the moon with the Artemis IV mission by 2028. NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman praised the Artemis II crew for accepting real risk as humanity’s ambassadors to the stars and said the mission laid the groundwork for returning to the lunar surface, building a moon base, and preparing for what comes next.
President Trump also congratulated the crew on social media, calling the landing perfect and expressing hope to welcome them to the White House. He added that Mars remains the next frontier.
What this mission proved
Artemis II was a flight test for the Orion spacecraft and its systems, including life support, manual controls, and the heat shield, which had shown problems during the uncrewed Artemis I mission in 2022. Engineers adjusted the reentry approach for this mission, opting for a steeper angle of attack to reduce the heat shield’s exposure time from 20 minutes to 14 minutes. The strategy worked.
The crew also tested the spacecraft’s toilet system, which ran into issues mid-mission related to how urine was disposed of, not the toilet itself. That system, along with the rest of the spacecraft, will be examined closely by engineers at Kennedy Space Center in Florida once Orion is returned there from Naval Base San Diego.
Mission managers have described Artemis II as an overwhelming success. Every phase of the return, from the final burn, to the service module separation, to reentry and splashdown, went off without issue.
The Orion spacecraft will be returned to Kennedy Space Center for a thorough post-flight inspection before work begins on Artemis III, which is targeting a lunar surface landing next year.