Artemis II Astronauts Safely Return to Earth After Historic Moon Flyby

First humans past the Moon in over 50 years

The four Artemis II astronauts splashed down in the Pacific Ocean at 5:07 p.m. PDT on Friday, wrapping up a 10-day mission that carried them farther from Earth than anyone has gone before. NASA astronauts Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, and Christina Koch, plus Canadian Space Agency astronaut Jeremy Hansen, were pulled from the Orion capsule by a recovery team and taken aboard the USS John P. Murtha for initial medical checks.

Their spacecraft, which the crew named Integrity, covered 694,481 miles in total. At the farthest point, they reached 252,756 miles from home — beating the distance record set by Apollo 13 in 1970.

What the mission pulled off

Artemis II launched on April 1 from Kennedy Space Center’s Pad 39B, riding the Space Launch System rocket with 8.8 million pounds of thrust at liftoff. After a day checking that all systems were healthy, Orion’s service module fired its main engine and sent the crew on a trajectory that brought them within 4,067 miles of the Moon’s surface at their closest pass.

This was the first time anyone has flown the SLS and Orion with a crew on board. NASA administrator Jared Isaacman — who knows a thing or two about commercial spaceflight himself — praised the crew for accepting “significant risk in service of the knowledge gained and the future we are determined to build.”

What happens next

With Artemis II done, NASA’s attention shifts to Artemis III, the mission that aims to land astronauts on the lunar surface for the first time since Apollo 17 in 1972. The current target date is 2028.

Isaacman put it plainly: the goal is to “return to the lunar surface, build the base, and never give up the Moon again.” The crew flew back to Johnson Space Center in Houston on Saturday, greeted by a standing ovation and reunions with their families.

Koch’s résumé keeps growing — she already holds the record for the longest single spaceflight by a woman, at 328 days on the ISS. Hansen is now the first Canadian to fly beyond low Earth orbit.

Sources: NASA, NBC News, CNN