Editor’s note: This is a developing story that will be updated later today.
Even when you’re one of the first people to go to the moon in half a century, there’s no place like home.
Artemis II is nearing the end of its historic lunar flyby. The Orion space capsule and its four astronauts are expected to splash down off the coast of San Diego on April 10 at 8:07 p.m. Eastern. NASA will livestream the reentry on its website beginning at 6:30 p.m., as well as on half a dozen streaming services.
Reentering Earth’s atmosphere may give the Orion capsule its most harrowing test yet. The capsule will touch the atmosphere for the first time since launch at 7:53 p.m. at an altitude of about 122 kilometers and moving more than 38,000 kilometers per hour.
The overall flight plan is not that different from those of the Apollo missions, said Artemis II flight director Jeff Radigan in an April 9 news briefing. “Big picture, coming back from the moon is all really close to the same thing,” he said. “It parallels Apollo much more than it does some of our low-Earth orbit returns.”
Shortly after reentry begins, the crew will be out of contact with mission control for about six minutes. The friction of the atmosphere will heat Orion’s heatshield to 2760° Celsius, creating a layer of superheated plasma that blocks communication from the spacecraft.
NASA engineers will be keeping a close eye on how the heat shield behaves. When the uncrewed Artemis I mission’s Orion capsule came back to Earth in December 2022, the heat shield returned unexpectedly scorched. Chunks of material were missing and other parts were cracked.
After an extensive investigation, NASA announced in 2024 that the cause of the charring was a buildup of gases that became trapped under an outer layer of material called Avocat, designed to decompose and carry heat away from the spacecraft. Instead of redesigning the heat shield itself, NASA redesigned the spacecraft’s reentry trajectory to lower the heat stress on the shield.
At an altitude of 7.6 kilometers, Orion will deploy a series of 11 parachutes to slow it down to about 30 km/h for splashdown. Once in the water, five orange airbags will fill with helium to help the capsule stay upright and let the astronauts emerge onto a large raft called the front porch. From there, the astronauts will make their way back to Houston by helicopter, boat and airplane.
“We have high confidence in the system, in the heat shield and parachutes and recovery systems together,” NASA associate administrator Amit Kshatriya said at the April 9 news briefing. “The crew is going to put their lives behind that confidence.”
