On April 10, 2026, at 5:07 p.m. Pacific time, the Orion capsule splashed down off the coast of San Diego — and for the first time in more than half a century, people who had flown to the Moon came home.
Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, Christina Koch, and Jeremy Hansen spent nearly 10 days in space and traveled 694,481 miles in total. At their farthest point — 252,756 miles from Earth — they broke the distance record held by the Apollo 13 crew since 1970. No human beings had ever been this far from home.
They came within 4,067 miles of the Moon. During their April 6 lunar flyby, the crew captured more than 7,000 images of the surface, observed a solar eclipse as the Moon blocked the Sun from Orion's perspective, and documented the terminator region near the south pole — where lighting conditions closely resemble what the Artemis III crew will face when they land in 2028.
Aboard the spacecraft the crew named Integrity, the astronauts put Orion through its first crewed in-flight evaluation: life support systems, manual piloting maneuvers, rendezvous and docking procedures — all validated for the first time with humans aboard. They also conducted medical research into how human tissue responds to microgravity and deep-space radiation.
Artemis II was not the destination — it was proof of concept. The vehicle works. The team works. The next step is Artemis III and a landing on the lunar surface.