What to know as the Artemis II crew speeds toward splashdown off Southern California

The crew of Artemis II is scheduled for splashdown Friday afternoon off the Southern California coast at the end of a 695,000-mile mission that marked a milestone moment for humanity.

Splashdown off the coast of San Diego is scheduled for a few minutes after 5 p.m., about 10 days after the crew embarked on its mission with a spectacular launch from the Florida coast.

Recovery teams will meet the four-member crew and use helicopters to transported them to the USS John P. Murtha, where they will undergo medical evaluations. Eventually, Commander Reid Wiseman, pilot Victor Glover, and mission specialists Christina Koch and Jeremy Hansen will travel to shore and board an aircraft for the flight to NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston.

Their journey after a majestic launch April 1 from Kennedy Space Center in Florida took the crew farther from Earth than any human and provided a view of the moon’s far side. Orion reached a maximum distance of about 252,760 miles from Earth, about 4,105 miles farther than the Apollo 13 mission.

On the far side, the crew had a chance to see a lunar landscape no humans had seen before, one of several extraordinary moments shared by the team of astronauts.

The four astronauts of the Artemis II mission named a moon crater “Carroll” as a tribute to the late wife of commander Reid Wiseman.

Former NASA astronaut José M. Hernández, of Stockton, was a mission specialist on a Discovery shuttle mission in 2009 to the International Space Station. He spent 14 days in space, including a bonus day due to weather conditions, and said the return home can be an emotional experience.

“It felt like the end of a short camping trip with your buddies,” Hernández said. “We didn’t want it to end. We wanted to stay there, so when we got that bonus day, we didn’t have a lot of work. We had time to look out and just look at our Earth and the stars. It was just an amazing time.”

Hernández and the Discovery mission crew landed at Edwards Air Force Base in the desert north of Los Angeles. He recalled the moments leading up to the landing, which was about six years after the Columbia disaster. Seven crew members died minutes before the scheduled landing in Florida when Columbia was destroyed on re-entry. During launch, falling foam from the external fuel tank damaged panels designed to protect the shuttle from the extreme heat of friction caused by Earth’s atmosphere.

“Your level of concern is a little higher,” Hernández said. “We lost a vehicle on entry because the wing had a crack, and so the hot plasma snapped the whole wing, and we lost the crew. There’s always that concern. And, in this particular case, it’s a different vehicle. There’s a capsule coming down and it’s the first one, it’s a test flight. The first one where we have folks inside the capsule as it comes down.

“The first (Artemis mission) we did that did not have people, there was a little damage on the thermal protection system. We believe we fixed it. We’re highly confident that we can put folks on there and bring them back safely, but there’s always that little concern. Everybody has done their homework, and I think we’re going to have a very successful end of mission.”

The trip back to Earth for the Artemis crew followed the same figure-eight path of Apollo 13 and relied mostly on the force of gravity. On Tuesday, the Orion capsule exited the lunar sphere of influence, meaning Earth’s gravitational pull became stronger than that of the moon’s gravity.

Using minimal fuel, the spacecraft’s thrusters ignited for a series of trajectory corrections, adjusting the course toward Earth. The Orion crew module will separate from the service module, its engines no longer needed to steer through space, before a fast descent toward the Pacific. The service module will burn up in Earth’s atmosphere.

California Live contributor Malou Nubla meets up with astronomer Ben Burress at the Chabot Space & Science Center in Oakland to talk about Artemis II. On Monday, April 6, 2026 the Artemis II crew officially shattered the record for the farthest distance humans have ever traveled from Earth, surpassing the mark set by Apollo 13 in 1970. The four astronauts are currently completing a high-stakes lunar flyby, providing humanity’s first up-close look at the Moon’s far side in more than 50 years.

The heat shield designed to protect the crew module will be subjected to extreme heat caused by friction about 75 miles above Earth and through re-entry. Within seconds, superheated plasma will build up around the capsule as it exterior temperatures soar to 3,000 degrees.

Communications with the crew will be temporarily blocked at that point.

A series of parachute deployments that will slow the craft from about 300 mph to 130 mph and, finally, 17 mph for splashdown. The module might land upright, upside-down or on its side before orange airbags inflate to steady the craft in an upright position, allowing the crew to exit safely.

Several weather-related factors will be considered before recovery operations begin, including wave height, wind speed, cloud coverage and visibility. NASA’s recovery criteria requires no thunderstorm activity within 30 nautical miles of the splashdown site. Wave heights should be less than 6 feet and winds below 25 knots.