Artemis II astronauts return from moon trip

Artemis II’s astronauts returned from the moon with a dramatic splashdown in the Pacific on Friday to close out humanity’s first lunar voyage in more than a half-century.

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IN this image provided by NASA, the Artemis II crew captured this view as the Earth sets behind the Moon during a lunar flyby, Monday, April 6, 2026. (NASA via AP)

(NASA via AP)

It was a triumphant homecoming for the crew of four whose record-breaking lunar flyby revealed not only swaths of the moon’s far side — never seen before by human eyes — but a total solar eclipse.

Commander Reid Wiseman, pilot Victor Glover, Christina Koch, and Canada’s Jeremy Hansen hit the atmosphere traveling Mach 33 - or 33 times the speed of sound — a blistering blur not seen since NASA’s Apollo moonshots of the 1960s and 1970s. Their Orion capsule, dubbed Integrity, made the plunge on automatic pilot.

The tension in Mission Control mounted as the capsule became engulfed in red-hot plasma during peak heating and entered a planned communication blackout.

All eyes were on the capsule’s life-protecting heat shield that had to withstand thousands of degrees during reentry. On the spacecraft’s only other test flight — in 2022, with no one on board ~ the shield’s charred exterior came back looking as pockmarked as the moon.