After a fiery trip through Earth’s atmosphere that lasted nearly 15 minutes, the crew's Orion spacecraft splashed down in the Pacific Ocean just after 8 p.m. ET on Friday.

After a fiery trip through Earth’s atmosphere that lasted nearly 15 minutes, the crew’s Orion spacecraft splashed down in the Pacific Ocean just after 8 p.m. ET on Friday.

The four Artemis II astronauts are back safely on Earth after flying around the moon on NASA’s first lunar mission in more than 50 years.

After a fiery trip through Earth’s atmosphere that lasted nearly 15 minutes, NASA astronauts Reid Wiseman, Christina Koch and Victor Glover and Canadian astronaut Jeremy Hansen splashed down in the Pacific Ocean off the coast of San Diego in their Orion capsule at 8:07 p.m. ET.

It was a picture-perfect splashdown under three huge parachutes, with the capsule landing upright and bobbing in the water as recovery teams raced to the scene.

  • DarthPub@retrofed.comEnglish
    221·
    11 hours ago

    This headline is better: Artemis II astronauts return home ALIVE, ending record-breaking NASA mission around the moon

    • hansolo@lemmy.today
      9·
      8 hours ago

      Yeah, let’s see how the heat shield performed. Are there big chunks missing from this one, too?

  • Buffalox@lemmy.world
    313·
    3 hours ago

    I have never had so little interest in a space mission. This seems to be without any real scientific goals, and being an American political project since NASA is now micromanaged by the White house, makes this seem about as irrelevant as it can possibly be.

    Edit:
    Kind of uplifting that people here have more optimism than me, but I’m sorry I simply can’t share your optimism about an agency that has been politicized and redesigned to promote private enterprise taking over space exploration. I hope your naivete will not be exploited. Except actually I don’t really have any hope of that.

      • JasonDJ@lemmy.zip
        10·
        9 hours ago

        Probably among the most impressive of which being the long-range optical data link (O2O), capable of a whopping 260Mbps.

        While that doesn’t sound like much, it’s still 100x the speed we’d get from prior radio technology. Having 2.5+ seconds of round-trip latency really puts a damper on things…at least until we can get past that pesky speed of light thing.