The Orion spacecraft splashed down in the Pacific Ocean at 01:00 BST, on Saturday, 11th of April, 2026 bringing an end to the crew’s historic 10-day, roughly 685,000-mile journey around the Moon and back.
Artemis II is the first crewed flight of the NASA-led Artemis program and the first crewed mission to travel beyond low Earth orbit since Apollo 17 in 1972.
The four-person crew; commander Reid Wiseman, pilot Victor Glover, mission specialist Christina Koch, and Canadian Space Agency astronaut Jeremy Hansen set a new record for the farthest distance humans have ever traveled from Earth during their journey around the Moon.
The Artemis II mission began with the successful liftoff of NASA’s Space Launch System rocket on April 1 at 6:35 p.m. from Launch Pad 39B at Kennedy Space Center in Florida, sending the first humans toward the Moon since 1972.
During the mission, the crew captured stunning imagery, including views from the far side of the Moon and a solar eclipse visible only from the spacecraft a moment astronaut Victor Glover described as one of the greatest gifts of the mission.
Re-entry proved to be one of the riskiest phases of the flight, as the Orion capsule’s heat shield had known design flaws, prompting NASA to plan a modified, steeper descent path to minimize the time the craft was exposed to peak temperatures.
The Orion capsule, landed upright in the Pacific in what NASA commentators described as a picture-perfect ending to the record-breaking mission.
Recovery teams retrieved the crew using helicopters, flying them to the USS John P. Murtha, where the astronauts underwent post-mission medical evaluations before heading to NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston.
NASA’s associate administrator noted that while engineers observed a handful of minor anomalies during the mission, the data gathered during the ten-day flight will prove invaluable in preparing for future Artemis missions, including one that aims to land humans on the Moon once again.
