Artemis II brought down to Earth with a splash after 'historic' trip around moon
The mission took the astronauts 252,756 miles away from Earth, deeper into space than anyone had flown before.
The Artemis II capsule and its four crew streaked through Earth's atmosphere and safely splashed down in the Pacific Ocean on Friday after nearly 10 days in space, rounding off the first voyage by humans to the vicinity of the moon in over half a century.
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NASA and U.S. Navy recovery teams secured the floating capsule and retrieved the four crew members - U.S. astronauts Wiseman, 50, Victor Glover, 49, and Christina Koch, 47, along with Canadian astronaut Jeremy Hansen, 50.
NASA's Orion capsule, dubbed Integrity, parachuted softly into calm seas off the Southern California coast, concluding a mission that four days prior took the astronauts 252,756 miles away from Earth, deeper into space than anyone had flown before.
The Artemis II flight, traveling a total of 694,392 miles (1,117,515 km) in two Earth orbits and a climactic lunar flyby some 4,000 miles from its surface, was the debut crewed test flight in a series of missions aiming to return astronauts to the lunar surface starting in 2028.
The astronauts blasted off from Cape Canaveral, Florida, on April 1 aboard NASA's giant Space Launch System rocket, orbiting twice around Earth before sailing on for a rare journey around the far side of the moon.
In so doing, they became the first astronauts to fly around Earth's only natural satellite since the Apollo program of the 1960s and '70s.
The crew's peak distance of 252,756 miles away broke the record of roughly 248,000 miles set in 1970 by the crew of Apollo 13.