Artemis II astronauts return after historic crewed lunar mission, splash down off San Diego

A parachute-assisted splashdown off San Diego and a same-day medical handoff on the USS John P. Murtha turned Artemis II’s return into a critical rehearsal for NASA’s next Moon landing. The nearly 10-day flight, flown in the Orion spacecraft named Integrity, ended at 8:07 p.m. EDT on April 10 after the capsule came home from a loop around the Moon that pushed the crew 252,756 miles, or 406,771 kilometers, from Earth.

Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, Christina Koch and Canadian Space Agency astronaut Jeremy Hansen were pulled from Orion after landing and flown by helicopter to the Navy recovery ship. There, the crew underwent initial post-mission medical evaluations before moving on to shore and then to NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston. For NASA, the sequence was more than a ceremonial return. It was a live test of reentry, recovery and astronaut handling that will feed directly into the certification work still ahead for Artemis III.

NASA described the landing as successful and said Orion was secured in the ship’s well deck before recovery crews prepared it for transport. The capsule is headed first to Naval Base San Diego and then to Kennedy Space Center in Florida for post-flight analysis, where engineers will examine how the spacecraft performed under reentry heating, parachute deployment and ocean recovery conditions. Those findings will shape the final risk assessment for the next crewed lunar landing attempt.

The crew’s Houston homecoming brought the mission’s stakes into sharp relief. At Ellington Field, near Johnson Space Center, NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman introduced the astronauts to a hangar full of NASA workers, military officers, lawmakers and current and retired astronauts. Wiseman told the crowd, “This was not easy,” underscoring how much of the flight depended on systems working cleanly on the way out, on the way back and during recovery. Glover said he was still processing what the four of them had done, while Hansen framed the crew as a stand-in for the larger team behind the mission.

The return landed on the 56th anniversary of Apollo 13’s launch, giving the Houston stop an added layer of institutional memory for a city that still treats human spaceflight as a matter of public responsibility as much as technical achievement. Artemis II, the first crewed lunar mission in more than 50 years, gave NASA exactly the sort of data-rich run it needed before Artemis III: a safe reentry, a clean recovery and a crew that arrived back on the ground ready to help tell mission managers what still has to be proven.