The four Artemis II astronauts are back safely on Earth after flying around the moon on NASA’s first lunar mission in more than 50 years.
Subscribe to read this story ad-free
Get unlimited access to ad-free articles and exclusive content.
After a fiery trip through Earth’s atmosphere that lasted nearly 15 minutes, NASA astronauts Reid Wiseman, Christina Koch and Victor Glover and Canadian astronaut Jeremy Hansen splashed down in the Pacific Ocean off the coast of San Diego in their Orion capsule at 8:07 p.m. ET.
It was a picture-perfect splashdown under three huge parachutes, with the capsule landing upright and bobbing in the water as recovery teams raced to the scene.
Minutes before, a six-minute communications blackout with mission controllers made for a nail-biting finish to the mission as the capsule plunged through Earth’s atmosphere.
Then, a very welcome call-out came over the airwaves.
“Houston, Integrity, we have you loud and clear,” Wiseman radioed to Mission Control at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston, using the name “Integrity” that the crew gave to their spacecraft.