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The number of human beings who have travelled to the moon and returned safely to Earth will grow to 28 on Friday night when Nasa’s Orion capsule containing four Artemis II astronauts will glide gently to a Pacific Ocean splashdown beneath three giant parachutes.
The scheduled 5.07pm PT landing (1.07am BST Saturday) off the coast of San Diego will mark the end of a 10-day lunar odyssey that made the three Americans and one Canadian the first people to travel beyond lower Earth orbit since the final mission of the Apollo program in December 1972.
It will also signal a new beginning for the US space agency and its international partners, after a highly successful test flight around the far side of the moon that at first observation appears to have met every one of its objectives.
Nasa has proven it can once again send humans safely to and from cislunar space, the void between Earth and its nearest celestial body, and will build on the knowledge gained to further propel the Artemis program towards a scheduled crewed moon landing in 2028, 56 years after the last.
The rest of humanity, meanwhile, has received memories of a week and a half in which the world appeared to come together for a rare moment of unity to enjoy stunning video footage and high-resolution images of the lunar surface – and Earth from afar – as well as some profound and heartfelt words from usually unsentimental astronauts as they described what they were seeing.
“I just had an overwhelming sense of being moved by looking at the moon,” the Nasa astronaut Christina Koch said of her first impressions of Orion’s closest approach on Monday, 4,067 miles (6,545km) above the lunar surface.
“It lasted just a second or two and I actually couldn’t even make it happen again, but something just threw me in suddenly to the lunar landscape and it became real.
“The moon really is its own unique body in the universe. When we have that perspective and we compare it to our home of the Earth, it just reminds us how much we have in common. Everything we need, the Earth provides, and that, in and of itself, is somewhat of a miracle.”
Koch became the only woman to have travelled to the moon and back during a mission of firsts. Jeremy Hansen of the Canadian Space Agency became the first non-American. Victor Glover, the Artemis II pilot, became the first person of color to do so.
Collectively, with the mission commander, Reid Wiseman, the four travelled farther from Earth than any human before them, reaching 252,756 miles, more than 4,000 beyond the previous record set by the Apollo 13 crew in April 1970.
It was not all plain sailing during their 695,000-mile voyage. Orion’s glitchy toilet in a capsule the size of a small camper van malfunctioned more than once, necessitating the temporary deployment of urine collection bags and inflight repairs from Koch in her alternative role of plumber.
There were moments of fun. The crew enjoyed an egg hunt of sorts on Easter Sunday, trying to find packets of dehydrated scrambled eggs hidden around the spacecraft. A plushie named Rise – the mission’s official mascot designed by eight-year-old California second-grader Lucas Ye, appeared regularly on camera during crew press conferences.
Probably the most emotional episode came on Monday, when the crew proposed dedicating a previously unnamed moon crater to Carroll Taylor Wiseman, wife of the Artemis II commander and mother of their daughters, Katey and Ellie, who died of cancer in 2020. Hansen struggled to get the words out, prompting tears and hugs among the four.
During the “business” side of the mission, the astronauts evaluated Orion’s life support systems, radiation detectors, next-generation spacesuits and tested other operations that will be crucial to future deep-space missions and Nasa’s longer-term plans for the Artemis program, including an ambitious $20bn moon base to be built within a decade.
The agency sees the first splashdown of a returning moon crew in more than five decades as an important next step. Although not as visually mesmerizing as the fiery 1 April launch from Florida’s Kennedy Space Center that sent Artemis II into the heavens, the landing still required a similar level of intricate planning, precision and execution.
Changes to the heat shield after anomalies arose on the uncrewed Artemis I mission of November 2022 gave Nasa confidence that Orion would withstand temperatures up to 5,000F (2,760C) at its 25,000mph re-entry to Earth’s atmosphere; and mission managers selected a steeper, direct path of re-entry to reduce heat stress.
A succession of deployments of Orion’s 11 parachutes at various altitudes was designed to slow the spacecraft to 325mph, then 130mph, before the three main chutes, their canopies stretching a combined 80 yards (73 meters), release for a further deceleration to a 17mph splashdown.
Coast Guard and Nasa recovery crews were positioned to cover a landing zone about 550 miles in diameter. After medical checks following hatch opening and a brief stopover at a San Diego military base, the crew’s next destination is Houston’s Johnson Space Center, which they last saw on 27 March, and a reunion with their families.
The four join only 24 other astronauts, all American men, who travelled to the moon and back during nine staffed Apollo missions between December 1968 and December 1972.
Nicky Fox, associate administrator of Nasa’s science mission directorate, summed up the importance and impact of the mission in a briefing with reporters this week.
“Our four Artemis II astronauts, Reid, Victor, Christina and Jeremy, took humanity on an incredible journey around the moon and brought back images so exquisite and brimming with science, they will inspire generations to come,” she said.
