HOUSTON — NASA astronauts Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover and Christina Koch, along with Canadian Space Agency astronaut Jeremy Hansen, splashed down safely in the Pacific Ocean off the coast of San Diego on Friday after completing the Artemis II mission, the first crewed flight around the Moon in more than 50 years, NASA officials said.
The Orion spacecraft, named Integrity by the crew, touched down at approximately 8:07 p.m. EDT (5:07 p.m. PDT) on April 10, concluding a roughly 10-day mission that took the astronauts farther from Earth than any humans in history. Recovery teams from NASA and the U.S. Navy quickly reached the capsule, and all four astronauts were extracted and transferred to the USS John P. Murtha for medical evaluations, according to NASA broadcasts and post-splashdown briefings.
The crew launched aboard Orion from Kennedy Space Center in Florida on April 1. During the mission, they conducted a lunar flyby on April 6, passing within about 4,000 miles of the Moon’s surface and traveling more than 248,000 miles from Earth at their farthest point, surpassing the record set by Apollo 13 in 1970, NASA said. The flight tested Orion’s systems in deep space ahead of future crewed lunar landings under the Artemis program.
All crew members were reported in good health after splashdown and were scheduled to return to NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston on Saturday, April 11, officials said. The spacecraft experienced re-entry temperatures of about 5,000 degrees Fahrenheit (2,760 degrees Celsius) and slowed from nearly 25,000 mph using a series of parachutes before hitting the water at about 20 mph.
NASA Administrator Bill Nelson praised the mission’s success during a post-splashdown news conference. “This has been a gift to the world from NASA,” he said, according to reports from the briefing.
The Artemis II mission marked the first time humans have flown beyond low-Earth orbit since the Apollo era. It follows the uncrewed Artemis I test flight in 2022 and is intended to pave the way for Artemis III, which aims to land astronauts on the Moon’s surface.
As of Saturday morning, the crew remained aboard the recovery ship undergoing post-mission checks. NASA has not released further details on any technical issues encountered during re-entry or splashdown. The Orion capsule was expected to be towed into the ship’s well deck for safekeeping.
