Four astronauts splashed down in the Pacific Ocean Friday night, completing NASA’s Artemis II mission — the first crewed lunar voyage since Apollo 17 in 1972.
The Orion capsule, named Integrity by its crew, hit the water at 8:07 p.m. ET, roughly 40 miles off the coast of San Diego. Mission Control called it a perfect bullseye. Commander Reid Wiseman radioed that all four crew members were doing well.
The 10-day mission covered 695,000 miles. The crew set a new record for the farthest distance any humans have traveled from Earth — 252,756 miles. That mark came April 6, during a lunar flyby that returned humans to the moon’s vicinity for the first time in half a century.
Re-entry carried heightened risk. Orion’s heat shield had known design flaws carried over from Artemis I. NASA flew a steeper descent angle to reduce exposure to peak temperatures. Recovery teams photographed the shield immediately after splashdown to assess damage for future missions.
The crew — NASA astronauts Wiseman, Victor Glover, and Christina Koch, along with Canadian Space Agency astronaut Jeremy Hansen — launched April 1 from Kennedy Space Center in Florida. Glover said watching the sun disappear behind the moon in a solar eclipse was the mission’s defining moment. “It just blew us all away,” he said.
Hansen delivered the mission’s most personal moment. He announced the crew had named a lunar crater “Carroll,” after Wiseman’s wife, who died of cancer in 2020. Wiseman called it the most profound moment of the flight.
NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman called the splashdown stunning and said it marked the beginning of the agency’s return-to-moon effort. Artemis III — targeting a lunar landing — remains the next milestone.
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