Artemis II astronauts return safely to Earth in dramatic splashdown

Update, 8:31 p.m.: 

The capsule carrying the four astronauts who took part in the record-breaking Artemis II lunar mission splashed down in the Pacific Ocean at 8:07 p.m. EDT Friday. Commander Reid Wiseman, pilot Victor Glover, Christina Koch and Canada’s Jeremy Hansen were aboard the Orion capsule and were doing well, according to radio transmissions from Wiseman. The splashdown brings to a close America's first lunar mission in more than 50 years—a mission that took the crew around the moon and enabled them to witness parts of the moon's far side that had never before been seen by human eyes. 

Original story:

The record-breaking Artemis II lunar mission is scheduled to conclude Friday with a splashdown in the Pacific Ocean near San Diego just after 5 p.m. local time. The crew’s fiery reentry is expected to begin about 13 minutes earlier, according to NASA. The Orion spacecraft’s crew module is expected to reenter Earth’s atmosphere at approximately 25,000 mph. The crew will experience about 3.9 Gs of force during the journey, which includes a planned six-minute communications blackout due to plasma buildup around the capsule, NASA said.

Orion’s path will be much more of a straight-down fall back into the atmosphere than the coasting arcs seen during the Apollo missions, according to Artemis II lead flight director Jeff Radigan. The reentry will still involve the usual “skip,” a brief dip into the atmosphere and back out to slow the capsule’s speed before the final descent, but the skip will be briefer than in the Apollo missions. The change in trajectory lessens the amount of time that the capsule’s heat shield is exposed to high temperatures, according to NASA Associate Administrator Amit Kshatriya. The capsule’s parachutes should slow it down to about 20 miles per hour at the point of splashdown, according to NASA. Both NASA and U.S. military teams will extract the four astronauts from their capsule.

Why does NASA need to lessen the time that the heat shield is exposed to high temperatures? The craft’s heat shield is the same model as that used in the Artemis I unmanned spacecraft tests in 2022. When Artemis I reentered the atmosphere, pieces of its charred heat shield unexpectedly broke off in several places. NASA later concluded that built-up gases inside the heat-resistant coating were unable to vent properly. While temperatures inside the capsule would have remained safe for astronauts, NASA modified the flight path to reduce the risk of cracking.

Former NASA astronaut Charles Camarda in January wrote an open letter to NASA administrators, saying that the agency didn’t fully understand what happened to the previous heat shield and should not use it for another mission. But NASA’s Kshatriya said Thursday that the agency had high confidence in the heat shield with the planned reentry path.

Dig deeper: Read my report on astronaut Victor Glover’s Christian message from aboard Orion.