NASA’s Artemis II mission has successfully concluded with the safe return of its four‑person crew to Earth. The Orion spacecraft splashed down in the Pacific Ocean off the coast of San Diego on the evening of April 10, 2026, after a roughly nine‑ to ten‑day lunar flyby that marked the first crewed flight beyond low Earth orbit since the Apollo era.
The astronauts—NASA’s Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, and Christina Koch, along with Canadian Space Agency astronaut Jeremy Hansen—executed a high‑speed re‑entry at around 24,000 mph, followed by a controlled descent using parachutes before landing in the waiting recovery zone. U.S. Navy teams retrieved the crew and capsule without incident, and officials reported all four members in good condition.
Artemis II was designed as an un‑docked lunar flyby test of Orion, the Space Launch System rocket, life‑support systems, communications, and deep‑space navigation. The mission did not land on the Moon but instead looped around it to validate the hardware and procedures needed for Artemis III and future lunar surface missions. NASA has stated that initial data from the flight will be used to inform final readiness reviews for follow‑on Artemis missions.
