NASA's Artemis II mission has successfully returned its four-person crew to Earth following a historic journey around the Moon — the first crewed lunar voyage in more than five decades. Recovery teams secured the Orion capsule and retrieved the crew within two hours of splashdown, marking the end of a landmark mission for NASA and its international partners.
The Artemis II crew consisted of NASA astronauts Reid Wiseman (commander), Victor Glover (pilot), and Christina Koch (mission specialist), along with Canadian Space Agency astronaut Jeremy Hansen. The mission carried the first woman and the first person of color on a lunar trajectory, representing a significant milestone in human spaceflight history.
The mission followed a free-return trajectory around the Moon, a path designed to test the Orion spacecraft and Space Launch System (SLS) under crewed conditions before a planned lunar landing attempt on a future Artemis mission. The flight built directly on the uncrewed Artemis I mission, which successfully orbited the Moon in late 2022.
NASA officials hailed the mission as a critical step toward returning humans to the lunar surface for the first time since Apollo 17 in December 1972. The Artemis program, developed in partnership with the Canadian, European, and Japanese space agencies, aims to establish a sustained human presence at and around the Moon as a stepping stone toward future crewed missions to Mars.
