Flying by the moon, witnessing an eclipse and traveling farther from Earth than any humans before, the four Artemis II astronauts have reached many milestones since launching from Kennedy Space Center nearly 10 days ago. If all goes to plan Friday, their most important milestone will be complete: getting home.
Orion is scheduled to begin atmospheric entry at 7:53 p.m. ET, just southeast of Hawaii. About 13 minutes later—around 8:07 p.m. ET—the capsule is expected to splash down in the Pacific off the coast of San Diego. To get there, the spacecraft will reenter at roughly 25,000 miles per hour and encounter temperatures up to about 5,000°F.
The crew—NASA’s Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover and Christina Koch, and Canadian Space Agency astronaut Jeremy Hansen—have been preparing for return for days. On the final day they will wake at 11:35 a.m. ET and begin configuring Orion for reentry, including a final course correction at 2:53 p.m. ET to fine-tune the trajectory.
Shortly before hitting the atmosphere, Orion will separate from its service module, which carried thrusters, solar panels and other hardware. The service module will fall back and burn up. Orion will then start its roughly 13-minute plunge; communications with Mission Control are expected to be lost for about six minutes during the peak heating and deceleration.
A series of parachutes will deploy to slow the capsule from hypersonic speeds to about 20 miles per hour for splashdown. The USS John P. Murtha is positioned near the recovery zone. A recovery team will approach the floating capsule, attach an inflatable raft beneath the hatch, and medical personnel will examine the crew before helping them out. The astronauts will then be transported back to Johnson Space Center in Houston.
Reentry carries inherent risks. As pilot Victor Glover said, it’s like “riding a fireball through the atmosphere.” Mission flight director Jeff Radigan emphasized the need to hit the correct reentry angle: “We have to hit that angle correctly. Otherwise, we’re not going to have a successful reentry.” The heat shield, which protects the capsule during the intense heating of descent, is a primary focus after Artemis I showed char loss under test conditions.
To mitigate risk, mission planners adjusted Artemis II’s reentry profile compared with Artemis I: instead of “skipping” off the atmosphere, Orion will come in steeper and faster to reduce the time spent in the most energetic heating phase. Radigan summarized the challenge: “It’s 13 minutes of things that have to go right,” adding that teams are methodically running through the necessary checklist.
So far, Artemis II has been a valuable flight test. The mission carried humans farther from Earth than any mission since the Apollo era, surpassing a distance record set by Apollo 13 in 1970. Crew activities included exercising manual control systems needed for future lunar docking, testing life-support systems for four astronauts in a confined cabin, and collecting images and geological observations of the lunar far side from a unique vantage point.
Not every system was flawless: the crew encountered problems with the mission’s first lunar-capable toilet, reverting at times to manual urinals. NASA said the issue involved the overboard-venting system for full urine tanks rather than the toilet unit itself.
After recovery, Orion will be returned to Kennedy Space Center for detailed examination. Engineers will inspect the heat shield, life-support hardware and plumbing to understand in-flight performance and to make any necessary updates ahead of Artemis III, the next planned mission.