Four astronauts and their Orion space capsule splashed down in the Pacific Ocean today, bringing the first crewed trip around the moon and back since 1972 to a successful end.
“What a journey!” mission commander Reid Wiseman said moments after splashdown.
During their 10-day odyssey, the crew of NASA’s Artemis 2 mission — Wiseman, pilot Victor Glover, mission specialist Christina Koch and Canadian astronaut Jeremy Hansen — became the most distant human travelers in history, swinging more than 4,000 miles past the moon’s far side. Koch is the first woman to venture beyond Earth orbit, Glover is the first Black astronaut to do so, and Hansen is the first non-U.S. astronaut to make such a trip.
The flight tested the Artemis program’s hardware and procedures to prepare the way for sending astronauts all the way to the lunar surface by as early as 2028, and for building a lunar base in the 2030s.
“It’s the most important human spaceflight mission I think we’ve done in many decades, in terms of what it meant historically, but also what it means for the future of the agency,” NASA Associate Administrator Amit Kshatriya said at a post-splashdown news conference.
Orion’s hardware — including components built in the Seattle area — came through when it counted. Two sets of thrusters for Orion were built by L3Harris’ Aerojet Rocketdyne team in Redmond, Wash., while mechanisms that were made by Karman Space & Defense in Mukilteo, Wash., facilitated the safe deployment of Orion’s parachutes in the mission’s final minutes.
NASA calculated that Orion traveled 700,237 miles in all, from its launch atop a massive Space Launch System rocket on April 1 to its splashdown off the coast of California at 5:07 p.m. PT.
