The four crew members of NASA’s Artemis II moon mission returned to Earth early this morning, with a splashdown in the Pacific Ocean.
It was a triumphant homecoming for the crew of four whose record-breaking lunar flyby revealed not only swaths of the moon’s far side that had never been seen before by human eyes but a total solar eclipse as well.
Commander Reid Wiseman, pilot Victor Glover, Christina Koch and Canada’s Jeremy Hansen hit the atmosphere travelling 33 times the speed of sound – a blistering blur not seen since NASA’s Apollo moonshots of the 1960s and 1970s.
Their Orion capsule, dubbed Integrity, made the plunge on automatic pilot. The tension in Mission Control mounted as the capsule became engulfed in red-hot plasma during peak heating and entered a planned communication blackout.
All eyes were on the capsule’s life-protecting heat shield that had to withstand thousands of degrees during reentry. The recovery ship, USS John P. Murtha, awaited the crew’s arrival off the San Diego coast, along with a squadron of military planes and helicopters.
During the 10-day Artemis II mission, the crew became the first humans to travel toward the moon in more than 50 years, and they set a new record for the farthest distance ever traveled from Earth. The astronauts were also the first to launch on NASA’s giant Space Launch System rocket and to travel aboard the Orion spacecraft.