Four astronauts are coming home to Southern California waters Friday, capping a nearly 10-day mission that took humans farther from Earth than anyone has traveled before.
NASA’s Artemis II crew, Commander Reid Wiseman, pilot Victor Glover, mission specialist Christina Koch, and Canadian Space Agency astronaut Jeremy Hansen, are scheduled to splash down in the Pacific Ocean off the coast of San Diego at 5:07 p.m. PT. If you’re anywhere near the SoCal coast this evening, you might actually catch a glimpse of the show.
Getting there won’t be simple.
The Orion capsule will hit the atmosphere at around 25,000 miles per hour and endure temperatures above 5,000 degrees Fahrenheit on the way down. Glover described the experience as riding a “fireball through the atmosphere.” Not a bad way to put it.
The crew woke up at 11:35 a.m. to start reconfiguring the capsule for reentry. At 2:53 p.m., they made a course correction to fine-tune the return trajectory. The sequence is tightly choreographed, each step timed to the minute.
At 7:33 p.m. ET, Orion separates from its service module, the section that housed thrusters, solar panels, and other hardware for the mission. That piece burns up in the atmosphere. The capsule itself, protected by its heat shield, begins its 13-minute plunge at 7:53 p.m. ET.
Radio silence. About six minutes of it, while the plasma surrounding the capsule blocks communication with Mission Control.
Then the parachutes deploy, a series of them, slowing the spacecraft from 25,000 miles per hour down to roughly 20 miles per hour by the time it hits the water. Thirteen minutes from fiery atmospheric entry to splashdown in the Pacific. The math on that is both impressive and slightly terrifying.
The USS John P. Murtha is already stationed near the splashdown zone southeast of San Diego. Once the capsule is floating, a recovery team will head out to install an inflatable raft below Orion’s side hatch. A flight surgeon will examine each crew member before they’re helped out. From there, they catch a ride back to Johnson Space Center in Houston.
The Artemis II crew launched from Kennedy Space Center roughly 10 days ago. Since then, they flew by the moon, witnessed an eclipse, and traveled farther from Earth than any humans in history. The mission was designed as a test run for the systems that will eventually carry astronauts back to the lunar surface, the first time that’s happened since Apollo 17 in 1972.
Glover said Wednesday that he’s been thinking about this reentry since he was selected for the mission back in 2023. “We have to get back,” he said from inside the Orion capsule. “There’s so much data that you’ve seen.”
Makes sense. A mission like this generates the kind of firsthand knowledge no simulation can fully replicate.
For San Diego and the broader SoCal coast, splashdowns feel almost routine at this point, even when they’re anything but. The Pacific off this stretch of coastline has served as a recovery zone going back to the Apollo era, and there’s something fitting about the crew coming down within sight of the California coast after traveling a quarter-million miles from it.
Worth watching, if you can. The reentry itself happens over the open ocean and the fireball phase won’t be visible from shore, but the window around 5 p.m. PT is worth stepping outside for. On a clear evening, the parachute descent might be visible on live NASA coverage, and the agency is streaming the whole sequence.
LAist has full coverage of what to expect from the splashdown, including the recovery timeline.
The broader Artemis program, NASA’s effort to return humans to the moon and eventually push toward Mars, depends on missions like this one going right. Artemis II was never meant to land on the moon. It was meant to prove the hardware and the crew can survive the round trip. If the Orion capsule hits the water at 5:07 p.m. with all four people aboard in good shape, that’s exactly what it will have done.
One more California sunset, then four astronauts come home.