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OFF THE COAST OF SAN DIEGO — After a 10-day, 620,000-mile journey that shattered records held since the Apollo era, the four astronauts of NASA’s Artemis II mission splashed down safely in the Pacific Ocean Friday evening, capping the first crewed voyage to the vicinity of the Moon in more than five decades and keeping the United States on track to return humans to the lunar surface by 2028.

The Orion spacecraft pierced Earth’s atmosphere at more than 24,000 miles per hour — faster than any returning crewed vehicle since Apollo 17 in 1972 — before deploying its parachutes and touching down in the Pacific near San Diego at 5:07 p.m. Pacific time. Mission Control in Houston called it “a perfect bullseye splashdown.” Within minutes, U.S. Navy recovery teams aboard the USS John P. Murtha were at the capsule.

A Crew That Made History

The Artemis II crew — NASA commander Reid Wiseman, pilot Victor Glover, mission specialist Christina Koch and Canadian Space Agency mission specialist Jeremy Hansen — became the first human beings to travel beyond low Earth orbit since Apollo 17. Along the way, they broke the distance record set by Apollo 13 in 1970, reaching a point 252,756 miles from Earth on the far side of the Moon.

Glover is the first Black astronaut to journey to the Moon. Koch is the first woman. Hansen is the first non-American. Each of those historic firsts was accomplished on a single mission that will be studied by future generations as a turning point for NASA’s return to deep-space exploration.

“We just saw something that humanity has not seen in more than 50 years,” NASA Administrator Bill Nelson told reporters at a post-splashdown news conference. “Four astronauts, around the Moon, home safely. The Artemis generation is no longer a promise. It is a reality.”

A Flawless Mission

Artemis II launched from Kennedy Space Center on April 1 atop NASA’s Space Launch System rocket, the most powerful vehicle ever flown by the American space program. Over the following nine days, the crew conducted a free-return trajectory around the Moon, testing the Orion spacecraft’s life support, communications, navigation and reentry systems in the deep-space environment that will be required for the Artemis III lunar landing mission.

At nearly every milestone, flight controllers reported that the spacecraft was performing at or above specification. The heat shield — the single most critical component during reentry, where temperatures soar to nearly 5,000 degrees Fahrenheit — performed flawlessly after NASA engineers spent years redesigning it following unexpected charring observed during the uncrewed Artemis I test flight in 2022.