The four crew members of NASA's Artemis II moon mission returned to Earth early this morning, with a splashdown in the Pacific Ocean. It was a triumphant homecoming for the crew of four, whose record-breaking lunar flyby revealed not only vast portions of the moon's far side that had never been seen by human eyes, but also a total solar eclipse. Commander Reid Wiseman, pilot Victor Glover, Christina Koch, and Canadian astronaut Jeremy Hansen entered the atmosphere at 33 times the speed of sound – a blistering speed not seen since NASA's Apollo moonshots of the 1960s and 1970s.
Their Orion capsule, nicknamed "Integrity," made the descent on autopilot. Tension mounted at Mission Control as the capsule was engulfed in superheated plasma and entered a planned communication blackout. All eyes were on the capsule's heat shield, which had to withstand thousands of degrees during re-entry. The recovery ship, USS John P Murtha, was waiting off the coast of San Diego, along with a squadron of military planes and helicopters. During the 10-day Artemis II mission, the crew became the first humans to travel toward the moon in more than 50 years, and they set a new record for the farthest distance ever traveled from Earth. The astronauts were also the first to launch on NASA's giant Space Launch System rocket and to travel aboard the Orion spacecraft.