After nearly ten days circling the Moon, the Artemis II crew has returned to Earth — and America is proud.
The four astronauts of NASA's Artemis II — commander Reid Wiseman, pilot Victor Glover, mission specialist Christina Koch, and Canadian Space Agency astronaut Jeremy Hansen — splashed down safely in the Pacific Ocean at 8:07 p.m. EDT, roughly 40 miles off the coast of San Diego. Mission Control called it a "perfect bullseye landing," and Wiseman radioed from inside the Orion capsule that all four crew members were doing well. Navy recovery crews aboard the USS John P. Murtha extracted the astronauts for medical checks before helicoptering them back to land.
The 10-day mission marked humanity's first crewed journey beyond low Earth orbit in more than half a century. The crew orbited the Moon, witnessed a lunar eclipse from the far side, and pushed the Orion spacecraft through a series of critical tests that will shape every deep-space mission NASA flies going forward. Jeremy Hansen became the first non-American to travel to the Moon, a milestone that cements Canada's role in the Artemis program and the broader international partnership driving lunar exploration.
Artemis II was never just about four people in a capsule. It was the proof-of-concept that the hardware, the heat shield, the life-support systems, and the human body itself can handle the trip to the Moon and back. With this mission in the books, NASA now turns its full attention to Artemis III — the mission that will put boots on the lunar surface for the first time since Apollo 17 in 1972. The dream of deep-space exploration is no longer theoretical. It is operational.