Artemis II safely splashes down in Pacific Ocean, concluding 10-day moon mission

The Artemis II capsule and its four-member crew streak through Earth’s atmosphere and safely splash down in the Pacific Ocean 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, parachutes gently into the sea off the Southern California coast shortly after 5 p.m. local time, concluding a mission that took the astronauts deeper into space than anyone had flown before.

The Artemis II flight, traveling a total of 694,392 miles (1,117,515 km) across two Earth orbits and a climactic lunar flyby some 252,000 miles away, was the debut crewed test flight in a series of Artemis missions that aim to start landing astronauts on the lunar surface starting in 2028.

The splashdown, about two hours before sunset, was carried by live video feed in a NASA webcast.

Recovery teams were standing by to secure the floating capsule and retrieve the crew — US astronauts Reid Wiseman, 50, Victor Glover, 49, and Christina Koch, 47, along with Canadian astronaut Jeremy Hansen, 50.

The crew’s homecoming clears a critical final hurdle for the Lockheed Martin-built Orion spacecraft, proving it will withstand the extreme forces of reentry from a lunar-return trajectory.

It follows a white-knuckle, 13-minute fiery plunge through Earth’s atmosphere, generating frictional heat that sent temperatures on the capsule’s exterior soaring to some 5,000 degrees Fahrenheit (2,760 degrees Celsius).

At the peak of reentry stress, as expected, intense heat and air compression formed a red-hot sheath of ionized gas, or plasma, that engulfed the capsule, cutting off radio communications with the crew for several minutes.

The tension broke as contact was reestablished 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.

It’s expected to take NASA and US Navy teams about an hour to secure the floating capsule and assist the four astronauts out of the vehicle and fly them to a nearby recovery ship to undergo an initial medical checkup.