Artemis II Crew Splashes Down Safely, Completing First Crewed Lunar Orbit in 50 Years

The Orion capsule nicknamed "Integrity" hit the Pacific Ocean at 8:07 p.m. EDT on April 10, 2026, traveling roughly 20 miles per hour after 11 parachutes arrested what had been a 24,000-mile-per-hour reentry. Sixty miles off San Diego, Commander Reid Wiseman, Pilot Victor Glover, Mission Specialist Christina Koch, and Canadian Space Agency Mission Specialist Jeremy Hansen completed the first crewed lunar mission in more than 50 years. NASA called it a "perfect bullseye splashdown." Getting four people safely from a bobbing capsule to a Navy ship required a precisely sequenced recovery operation that proved as demanding, in its own way, as the mission itself.

Before any rescue vessel could approach Orion, a NASA software team called "Sasquatch" had been plotting the exact ocean coordinates where jettisoned hardware would fall. As Orion descended, it shed the forward bay cover, drogue parachutes, pilot parachutes, and mortars, all tumbling unpredictably into the water below. "The positioning of those [jettisoned] items is predicted as footprints, hence the team name, Sasquatch," explained Emily Spreen, a Purdue University alumna who leads the team. Her predictions kept recovery boats and helicopters clear of falling debris. Fellow Purdue alumnus Jason Endsley fed real-time weather and ocean data into recovery decision-making, while Rob Lantz, a third Purdue alum with 108 launches since 1989, also supported the operation.

Even after splashdown, recovery crews could not immediately approach. Hazardous propellant fumes required a mandatory 30-to-45-minute wait before rigid-hull inflatable boats, launched from the well deck of the USS John P. Murtha, moved in. Navy divers from Explosive Ordnance Disposal Group One installed an inflatable stabilization collar to prevent the capsule from rolling, then positioned an inflatable extraction platform, called the "front porch," beneath Orion's side hatch.

The first faces the crew saw belonged to a four-person Navy dive medical team led by Lt. Cmdr. Jesse Wang, a board-certified emergency medicine physician assigned to EODGRU-1. His team, which included Hospital Corpsman 1st Class Steve Kapala, Chief Hospital Corpsman Vlad Link, and Senior Chief Hospital Corpsman Laddy Aldridge, conducted medical assessments inside the capsule before any astronaut emerged. "As a proud member of the undersea medical community, I am particularly humbled to play a part in this mission," Wang said. Commander Wiseman was last out, approximately 90 minutes after splashdown.

Artemis II Landing and Recovery Director Liliana Villarreal monitored the crew via video feed before they appeared publicly. "Everybody was doing very well, and they were just having such a great time with the medical team that was inside the capsule. I think they were all taking selfies," she said.

Two MH-60S Seahawk helicopters from Helicopter Sea Combat Squadron 23 ferried the astronauts, two at a time, to the Murtha, with two more providing overwatch. The goal was to have all four in the ship's medical bay within two hours. Recovery of the Orion capsule itself, towed into the Murtha's well deck on a specialized cradle, takes four to six hours. Divers photographed the capsule's 16.5-foot Avcoat heat shield immediately after splashdown for engineering data; it had withstood temperatures of 5,000 degrees Fahrenheit during the 13-minute atmospheric descent.

Artemis II departed from Apollo precedent in technique as well as era. The mission used a "skip entry" method, dipping into the upper atmosphere before bouncing back into space for a second, final descent, distributing heat across two atmospheric passes and allowing precise targeting of the San Diego splashdown zone. After evaluation aboard the Murtha, the crew was helicoptered to Naval Air Station North Island and then flown to NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston.