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 this afternoon, concluding a mission that four days prior took the astronauts 252,756 miles away from Earth, deeper into space than anyone had flown before.
The Artemis II flight, traveling a total of 1,117,515 km in two Earth orbits and a climactic lunar flyby some 4,000 miles from its surface, was the debut crewed test flight in a series of Artemis missions that aim to return astronauts to the lunar surface starting in 2028.
The splashdown under partly cloudy skies 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 upright 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.
The crew's homecoming was the riskiest test of the mission and its Lockheed Martin-built (LMT.N), opens new tab Orion spacecraft, proving the capsule's heat shield could withstand the extreme forces of re-entry from a lunar-return trajectory.
The capsule plunged into Earth's atmosphere at 32 times the speed of sound, with atmospheric friction pummeling its heat shield at temperatures of some 2,760 degrees Celsius.
A sheath of ionized gas enveloped the vehicle, causing a planned radio blackout of over six minutes at the peak of re-entry stress.
The tension broke as contact was re-established some 40 seconds later than expected, and two sets of parachutes billowed from the nose of the free-falling capsule to slow its descent to about 15 mph 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 a 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.
