By Joey Roulette and Steve Gorman
HOUSTON, April 10 (Reuters) - The Artemis II capsule and its four-member crew streaked through Earth's atmosphere and safely splashed down in the Pacific Ocean on Friday after nearly 10 days in space, capping the first voyage by humans to the moon in over half a century.
NASA's gumdrop-shaped Orion capsule, dubbed Integrity, parachuted gently into calm seas off the Southern California coast shortly after 5 p.m. PT, concluding a mission that took the astronauts deeper into space than anyone had flown before.
The Artemis II flight, traveling a total of 694,392 miles (1,117,515 km) across two Earth orbits and a climactic lunar flyby some 252,000 miles away, was the debut crewed test flight in a series of Artemis missions that aim to return astronauts to the lunar surface starting in 2028.
The splashdown, about two hours before sunset, was carried by live video feed in a NASA webcast. "A perfect bull's eye splashdown for Integrity and its four astronauts," NASA commentator Rob Navias said moments after the landing.
Recovery teams were standing by to secure the floating capsule and retrieve the crew - U.S. astronauts Reid Wiseman, 50, Victor Glover, 49, and Christina Koch, 47, along with Canadian astronaut Jeremy Hansen, 50.
"We got a great view of the moon out window 2 - looks a little smaller than yesterday," Wiseman, mission commander, radioed to mission control in Houston minutes before the crew dove into Earth's atmosphere.
"Guess we'll have to go back," mission control replied.
The crew's homecoming cleared a critical final hurdle for the Lockheed Martin-built Orion spacecraft, proving it would withstand the extreme forces of re-entry from a lunar-return trajectory.
It followed a white-knuckle, 13-minute fiery plunge through Earth's atmosphere, generating frictional heat that sent temperatures on the capsule's exterior soaring to some 5,000 degrees Fahrenheit (2,760 degrees Celsius).
At the peak of re-entry stress, as expected, intense heat and air compression formed a red-hot sheath of ionized gas, or plasma, that engulfed the capsule, cutting off radio communications with the crew for several minutes.
The tension broke as contact was re-established and two sets of parachutes were seen billowing from the nose of the free-falling capsule, slowing its descent to about 15 mph (25 kph) before Orion gently hit the water.
It was expected to take NASA and U.S. Navy teams about an hour to secure the floating capsule, assist the four astronauts out of the vehicle, hoist them into helicopters hovering overhead and fly them to a nearby Navy ship, the USS John P. Murtha, to undergo an initial medical checkup.
The crew was expected to spend the night aboard the vessel and be flown on Saturday to Houston, where they would be reunited with family.
STEPPING STONE TO MARS
The quartet blasted off from Cape Canaveral, Florida, on April 1, lofted into an initial Earth orbit by NASA's giant Space Launch System rocket before sailing on for a rare journey around the far side of the moon.
In so doing, they became the first astronauts to fly in the vicinity of Earth's only natural satellite since the Apollo program of the 1960s and '70s. Glover, Koch and Hansen also made history as the first Black astronaut, the first woman and first non-U.S. citizen, respectively, to take part in a lunar mission.
At the flight's peak, the Artemis astronauts reached a point 252,756 miles from Earth, exceeding the previous record of roughly 248,000 miles set in 1970 by the crew of Apollo 13.
The voyage, following the uncrewed Artemis I test flight around the moon by the Orion spacecraft in 2022, marked a critical dress rehearsal for a planned attempt later this decade to land astronauts on the lunar surface for the first time since Apollo 17 in late 1972.
The ultimate goal of the Artemis program is to establish a long-term presence on the moon as a stepping stone to eventual human exploration of Mars.
In a historical parallel to the Cold War era of Apollo, the Artemis II mission has played out against a backdrop of political and social turmoil, including a U.S. military conflict that has proven unpopular at home.
PUBLIC FASCINATION
For many in a global audience captivated by the latest moon shot, it reaffirmed the achievements of science and technology at a time when big tech has become widely distrusted, even feared.
More than 3 million viewers watched the splashdown on NASA's YouTube channel, the streaming service showed.
The return to Earth put the Orion spacecraft through a critical test of its heat shield, which sustained an unexpected level of scorching and stress on re-entry during its 2022 test flight. As a result, NASA engineers altered the descent trajectory for Artemis II in order to reduce heat buildup and lower the risk to the capsule and its crew.
Last week's successful launch was a major milestone for the SLS rocket, handing its principal contractors, Boeing and Northrop Grumman, long-sought validation that the launch system more than a decade in development was ready to safely fly humans to space.
NASA's renewed lunar ambitions have been clouded in recent months, however, by workforce reductions under the Trump administration's federal downsizing efforts that have cut space agency personnel by 20%.
The Artemis program, named after the twin sister of Apollo, stands as a major turning point for NASA, redirecting its human spaceflight program beyond low-Earth orbit after decades focused on space shuttles and the International Space Station.
Compared with Apollo, born of the Cold War-era U.S.-Soviet space race, NASA has characterized Artemis as a broader, more cooperative effort, while hoping to return to the moon before China, which is aiming for a 2030 crewed landing.
The U.S. lunar program has enlisted commercial partners such as Elon Musk's SpaceX and Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin, which are building the program's lunar landers, and the space agencies of Europe, Canada, and Japan.
(Reporting by Steve Gorman in Los Angeles and Joey Roulette in Houston; Editing by Bill Berkrot)
