On Friday evening the Artemis II crew, comprised of Commander Reid Wiseman, Pilot Victor Glover, Mission Specialist Christina Koch and Mission Specialist Jeremy Hansen, capped off their historic 10-day journey around the moon and back again by pulling off one of the most challenging parts of their mission: Coming back home.
As the astronauts approached home the Orion capsule separated from its service module (which burned up over the Pacific Ocean), revealing its heat shield to prepare for smacking into the gaseous layer at the top of Earth’s atmosphere, an altitude of 400,000 feet.
“The moon looks a little smaller than it did yesterday,” Wiseman noted as he looked out the capsule’s window.
“Guess we’ll just have to go back,” Jacki Mahafey, the capsule communicator, replied.
Then the crucial moment of entry interface, the point where the capsule encounters the upper boundary of Earth’s atmosphere, began. Temperatures outside the Orion capsule went up to 5,000 degrees Fahrenheit as it streaked through the atmosphere, moving at such speed that the capsule was surrounded by a coating of plasma that cut off communications with the crew for six minutes.
The most intense minutes of the landing were after the on-board cameras went to a blue screen and the crew’s communications went silent.
There had been some concern about the Orion’s heat shield in the the leadup to the launch. Back when Artemis I embarked for reentry after its uncrewed spaceflight back in 2022, the return went off without a hitch but once the capsule was retrieved post splashdown, NASA engineers were surprised to find that although the heat shield had survived reentry, chunks of the shield were missing.
Based on these findings, it was decided that future Orion spacecraft will have heat shields with a different type of coating formula on them, but for Artemis II NASA officials determined that the current heat shield, which had already been created when Artemis I launched, could still be used. To minimize the risk to the crew, they opted to have the capsule go through a shorter re-entry at a sharper angle to minimize the amount of time the vehicle would be exposed to high temperatures.
Luckily, their calculations were correct, and the heat shield held up well enough to get the orange spacesuit clad astronauts inside it back here safely.
“Houston, Integrity, we have you loud and clear,” Wiseman called out, ending the communications blackout. At Houston’s mission control (shown on live video stream) the relief was palpable and cheers erupted from the team.
Pushing against our atmosphere slowed the capsule down from about 24,000 mph — 30 times the speed of sound — to roughly 335 mph. From there, the capsule drifted down to the Pacific, looking like a toy dangling from three enormous red and white parachutes, slowing the capsule to a cool 19 mph in the final minutes before it dunked into the Pacific along the southern California coast.
“What a journey. We are stable. Four green crew members,” Wiseman said moments after splashdown, indicating that all four astronauts were in good shape.
From there, the crew began to power down the module while recovery teams from NASA and the U.S. Navy bobbed in the water nearby, ready to pluck the astronauts out of Integrity onto two U.S. Navy helicopters and deposit them on their waiting ship, the USS John P. Murtha where they’ll undergo medical exams.
From there they will be flown to San Diego where they are slated to board a NASA jet that will tote them back to Johnson Space Center right here in Houston.
Their triumphant plop into the Pacific marks the end of a historic mission that saw the Artemis crew fly further into space than humans ever have, just over 250,000 miles, breaking the Apollo 13 record, and become the first humans to fly over the lunar surface since Apollo 17 left in 1972. Along the way they also orbited the dark side of the moon, laying eyes on sections of the lunar surface that had never been beheld by human eyes.
By the time they reached home they had traveled more than 695,000 miles, named two craters (one is called the Integrity, the name of their Orion spacecraft, and the other is the Carroll in honor of Wiseman’s wife who died of cancer in 2020), tested out everything from the Orion’s heatshield to their new spacesuits (designed with a new life support system that should allow astronauts to stay alive for up to six days in an emergency situation), and found many problems with the Universal Waste Management System, the first toilet sent into deep space, along with a score of other things.
Most importantly, they had made the prospect of NASA putting boots on the moon again in the near future — potentially as soon as 2028, according to NASA’s current plans — feel tantalizingly possible.
