Artemis II Splashdown — Crew Returns to Earth After Historic 10-Day Lunar Mission

Flight Day 10 of Artemis II concludes with splashdown off the coast of San Diego, California, completing humanity's first crewed lunar flyby mission in over 50 years. The Orion spacecraft executes a skip-reentry trajectory — a modified approach developed after the Artemis I heat shield anomaly — entering the atmosphere, briefly skipping out, and then arcing back for final deceleration. The communications blackout of approximately 6 minutes occurs as Orion is enveloped in a plasma sheath during maximum heating. The forward bay cover is jettisoned, drogue parachutes deploy near 22,000 feet at approximately 8:03 p.m. EDT, followed by the three main parachutes at approximately 6,000 feet at 8:04 p.m. EDT. Splashdown is targeted at approximately 8:07 p.m. EDT (5:07 p.m. PDT). The USS John P. Murtha serves as the primary recovery vessel. Within two hours after splashdown, the crew — Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, Christina Koch, and Jeremy Hansen — will be extracted from the capsule and transferred to the ship, then flown back to NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston. A post-splashdown news conference is scheduled at JSC for 9:30 p.m. CT. The mission completes the primary test objective of validating Orion for crewed deep-space flight and provides flight data for the modified skip-reentry trajectory — directly enabling the crewed lunar landing targeted for Artemis IV in 2028.