Four astronauts splashed down in the Pacific Ocean off the coast of San Diego just after 5:07 p.m. local time on Friday, April 10, bringing NASA's Artemis II journey around the moon to an end.
The crew included pilot Victor Glover, mission specialist Christina Koch, commander Reid Wiseman and Canadian Space Agency astronaut Jeremy Hansen. Their flight made them the first people to travel to the moon and back in more than half a century, a milestone that links the mission to one of the most closely watched chapters in U.S. space history.
The splashdown matters because it closes a mission that had been building toward this moment from the start: a crewed trip around the moon and back, completed on schedule and in one piece. For Koch, whose name now sits at the center of the christina koch artemis ii message many viewers will remember from the mission, the return is part of a broader milestone for a four-person team that carried the test flight to its finish.
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What comes next is the hard, quiet part that follows every success of this kind: review, assessment and preparation for whatever NASA decides to do with the Artemis program after proving it can send astronauts to the moon and bring them home again. The flight has ended, but its significance is likely to stay with the agency far longer than the few minutes it took the capsule to touch the ocean.
