NASA's Artemis II crew splashes down in Pacific Ocean

The four astronauts of NASA's Artemis II lunar mission returned to Earth on Friday evening, completing a parachute-assisted splashdown in the Pacific Ocean off the coast of San Diego, California, at 8:07 pm ET (5:07 pm PT).

Commander Reid Wiseman reported shortly after splashdown that all four crew members were in good condition.

By 10 pm, after recovery crews assisted them in exiting the Orion spacecraft, the astronauts were lifted by helicopter to the USS John P Murtha. According to US media reports, all four were able to walk unassisted across the flight deck to undergo medical checks.

The crew will undergo post-mission medical evaluations before returning to shore and boarding an aircraft bound for NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston.

Meanwhile, Navy divers will retrieve the Orion spacecraft from the ocean, returning it first to US Naval Base San Diego before it is shipped to NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida for inspection.

The mission's re-entry carried elevated risk due to known design flaws in Orion's heat shield — the critical layer that protects astronauts from extreme temperatures during atmospheric re-entry. To mitigate this risk, NASA modified the capsule's re-entry trajectory, sending Orion on a steeper, faster descent to minimize its exposure to peak heat.

Artemis II lifted off from Kennedy Space Center on April 1, carrying four astronauts on the first crewed flight around the Moon in more than 50 years. The crew — NASA Commander Reid Wiseman, pilot Victor Glover, mission specialist Christina Koch and Canadian astronaut Jeremy Hansen — completed the 10-day mission without a lunar landing.

On Monday, the crew set a new record for the farthest distance from Earth ever traveled by humans, reaching a maximum distance of 406,771 kilometers, surpassing the 400,171-km mark set by the Apollo 13 mission in April 1970.

During the lunar flyby, Orion passed within 6,550 km of the Moon's surface. The lunar observation period lasted nearly seven hours, during which the astronauts studied the Moon's terrain, including features of the far side that are not visible from Earth and have rarely been seen by human eyes.

The Artemis II mission was designed to demonstrate a broad range of capabilities required for deep space exploration, including validating Orion's life-support systems and practicing operations critical to future lunar missions.

Artemis II is NASA's first crewed mission under the Artemis lunar exploration program, which was announced in 2019 with an original goal of landing astronauts on the Moon by 2024. The agency conducted Artemis I, an uncrewed moon-orbiting mission, in November 2022.

NASA revised the Artemis program timeline in February, inserting an additional mission and postponing the crewed lunar landing. Under the updated plan, Artemis III will focus on testing systems and operational capabilities in low Earth orbit in 2027, ahead of the Artemis IV crewed lunar landing mission in 2028.