NASA’s Artemis 1 moonship returned to Earth Sunday, slamming into the upper atmosphere at more than 24,000 mph and enduring a 5,000-degree re-entry inferno before settling to a picture perfect splashdown in the Pacific Ocean to close out a 25-day 1.4-million-mile test flight to the moon and back.
Descending under three huge parachutes, the unpiloted 9-ton Orion capsule gently hit the water 200 miles west of Baja California at 12:40 p.m. EST, 20 minutes after encountering the first traces of the discernible atmosphere 76 miles up.
“I’m overwhelmed. This is an extraordinary day,” said NASA Administrator Bill Nelson. “It’s historic, because we are now going back into deep space with a new generation.”
In an appropriate if unplanned coincidence, the splashdown came 50 years to the day after the final Apollo 17 moon landing in 1972 and just 10 hours after SpaceX launched a Japanese moon lander, the first sent up in a purely a commercial venture, from Cape Canaveral.
“From Tranquility Base to Taurus-Littrow to the tranquil waters of the Pacific, the latest chapter of NASA’s journey to the moon comes to a close. Orion, back on Earth,” said NASA commentator Rob Navias at the moment of Orion’s splashdown, referring to the Apollo 11 and 17 landing sites.
Nelson also reflected on Apollo, saying President John F. Kennedy “stunned everybody with the Apollo generation, and said that we were going to achieve what we thought was impossible.”
“It’s a new day,” Nelson said. “A new day has dawned. And the Artemis generation is taking us there.”
A joint Navy-NASA recovery team was standing by within sight of the Orion splashdown to inspect the scorched capsule and, after a final round of tests, tow it into the flooded well deck of the USS Portland, an amphibious dock ship.
After the sea water is pumped out, Orion will settle onto a protective cradle for the voyage back to Naval Base San Diego and, eventually, a trip home to the Kennedy Space Center.
Re-entry and splashdown were the final major objectives of the Artemis 1 test flight, giving engineers confidence the spacecraft’s 16.5-foot-wide Apollo-derived Avcoat heat shield and parachutes will work as designed when four astronauts return from the moon after the next Artemis flight in 2024.
Testing the heat shield was, in fact, the top priority of the Artemis 1 mission, “and it is our priority-one objective for a reason,” mission manager Mike Sarafin said Friday.
“There is no arc jet or aerothermal facility here on Earth capable of replicating hypersonic reentry with a heat shield of this size,” he said. “And it is a brand new heat shield design, and it is a…
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