Artemis-II crew returns after historic moon flyby

Amid claps and cheers, four astronauts of NASA’s Artemis-II mission splashed down in the Pacific Ocean after a historic flight to the moon – the first by humans in more than 50 years.

“The path to the moon is open but the work ahead is greater than the work behind,” Amit Kshatriya, Indian-origin NASA Associate Administrator, told a press conference shortly after the Artemis-II crew returned to earth off the coast of San Diego at 8.07 eastern time on Friday. The lunar flyby mission involving Commander Reid Wiseman, pilot Victor Glover, Christina Koch and Canada’s Jeremy Hansen was the first journey to the moon since the Apollo 17 mission in December 1972, when Eugene Cernan and Harrison Schmitt spent three days exploring the lunar surface. Rick Henfling, the flight director, said the Artemis II astronauts are “happy and healthy and ready to come home to Houston.”

Artemis II was the first crewed mission to utilise NASA’s Space Launch System rocket and Orion crew module — demonstrating that the agency’s equipment can propel astronauts out of Earth’s orbit and bring them safely home. “Yesterday, flight director Jeff Radigan said we had less than a degree of an angle to hit after a quarter of a million miles to the moon,” Kshatriya told reporters. “And their team hit it. This is not luck; that is 1,000 people doing their job,” he said. The mission flew 700,237 miles; its peak velocity was 24,664 mph.; and the flight had an entry range of 1,957 miles but landed within one mile of its target, Henfling said.

NASA now aims to land humans on the moon, where the space agency also plans to set up a habitat that would be the launchpad for future missions to Mars and beyond. 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. They emerged from their bobbing capsule into the sunlight one by one.

Henfling said his team ‘breathed a sigh of relief’ once the side hatch opened on the Orion Integrity after it splashed down in the Pacific Ocean. “We all breathed a sigh of relief once the hatch opened up. That’s when we brought the team in,” he said. “We said a few words to the flight controllers and waved and gave them a thumbs up, and we all watched as each of their four astronauts got out of the spaceship and were hoisted up onto the helicopters.