OAN Staff Addie Davis
Friday, April 10, 2026
5:20 PM: The Orion capsule carrying the Artemis II crew safely splashed down off the coast of San Diego at 5:07 p.m. local time, officially completing the journey that took humans farther into space than ever before.
NASA said engineers will conduct additional tests while the spacecraft is in the water before powering it down and handing it over to the recovery team, which is on site aboard the USS John P. Murtha and headed to the capsule to assist the crew.
After being extracted by the combined NASA and U.S. military recovery team and taken aboard the Navy ship, they will undergo medical evaluations prior to being taken to shore.
3:16 PM: The Artemis II crew is expected to splash down off the coast of San Diego, California, today, marking the completion of their historic trip around the moon.
Splashdown is scheduled to occur at 5:07 p.m. local time (Pacific Standard Time), according to NASA.
A combined NASA and U.S. military recovery team will extract the crew from the Orion spacecraft after landing in the Pacific, helping them onto an inflatable raft, and then using helicopters to fly them to the USS John P. Murtha. After being taken ashore, aircraft will then fly the crew to NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston.
According to the U.S. Geological Survey, you might be able to hear or feel the sonic boom as the spacecraft reenters the atmosphere if you’re in Southern California, though NASA scientists noted it’s not likely you would be able to see the splashdown, per NBC 7 San Diego.
On their mission blog that provides updates of Artemis II, NASA detailed the experiences of the planned reentry.
Roughly half an hour before splashdown, Orion’s crew module will separate from the service module, exposing its heat shield for reentering the Earth’s atmosphere, where the spacecraft is expected to encounter temperatures of around 3,000 degrees Fahrenheit.
A burn will then be conducted in order to set the proper entry angle and align the heatshield. At 400,000 feet above the Earth’s surface, the craft will make the first contact with the upper atmosphere.
Traveling nearly 35 times the speed of sound, the crew is expected to experience up to 3.9 G-forces as the craft descends through the atmosphere. NASA explained there will be a six-minute planned communications blackout as plasma builds around the capsule.
At around an altitude of 22,000 feet, the drogue parachutes, which are designed for high speeds, will deploy to slow descent and stabilize the craft. They will then release at an altitude of around 6,000 feet, where the three main parachutes will then deploy to reduce Orion’s speed to under 136 mph.
Slowed down to 20 mph, the capsule will splash down into the Pacific Ocean, completing the 694,481-mile journey to the moon and back.
The Artemis II crew, consisting of NASA astronauts Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, Christina Koch and Canadian Space Agency (CSA) astronaut Jeremy Hansen, achieved the historic flyby of the moon on Monday, marking the first-time humans have returned to the lunar body in over 50 years.
They also broke the record held by Apollo 13 for the farthest mankind has ever gone into space, with Artemis II reaching a maximum distance from Earth of 252,756 miles.
During their mission, they photographed the moon and completed scientific observations, as well as evaluated Orion’s systems in the deep-space environment. This mission precedes expected future missions to land humans on the moon, establish a lunar base, and travel to Mars, according to NASA.
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