Artemis II Crew Splashes Down After 10-Day Moon Flyby
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- Artemis II splashed down off San Diego on Friday with all four astronauts in good health, completing a 9-day, 1-hour, 32-minute mission officially recorded as 10 days, in which Orion traveled 694,481 miles.
- The crew — Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, Christina Koch, and Jeremy Hansen — reached 252,756 miles from Earth, surpassing Apollo 13's 1970 distance record by more than 4,000 miles.
- The mission logged a series of firsts: Christina Koch became the only woman to travel to the moon and back, Jeremy Hansen the first non-American, and Victor Glover the first person of color.
- NASA validated hardware critical to future deep-space flights, including life support systems, radiation detectors, next-generation spacesuits, and a redesigned heat shield that withstood 5,000°F temperatures during 25,000 mph re-entry.
- Orion's toilet malfunctioned multiple times, forcing the crew to fall back on urine collection bags while Koch, serving as the mission's impromptu plumber, performed inflight repairs.
- NASA is targeting a crewed lunar landing in 2028 — 56 years after Apollo 17 — as the next milestone toward a planned $20 billion moon base to be built within a decade.
- During the mission the crew proposed naming a previously unnamed lunar crater after Carroll Taylor Wiseman, the commander's late wife who died of cancer in 2020, prompting tears and embraces among the four.
Why it matters: NASA has now demonstrated it can safely send humans to cislunar space and bring them home, clearing the technical hurdle for its scheduled 2028 crewed landing and a planned $20 billion lunar base. The crew's record-breaking distance and the historic firsts — first woman, first non-American, first person of color — expand who can claim a seat on deep-space missions.
