The Orion capsule carrying the Artemis II crew splashed down in the Pacific Ocean off San Diego on April 10, completing a nine-day mission that took four astronauts farther from Earth than any human beings since Apollo 17 in December 1972 [1].

The crew — NASA astronauts Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, and Christina Hammock Koch, and Canadian Space Agency astronaut Jeremy Hansen — reached a peak distance of 252,756 miles from Earth during the lunar flyby [1]. The previous crewed distance record, set by Apollo 13 in 1970 as a consequence of emergency trajectory decisions, was 248,655 miles.

This was not a Moon landing. Artemis II was an orbital and flyby test of the Orion capsule and its life support systems with crew aboard — the last test before Artemis III attempts an actual lunar landing. The mission launched April 1 and completed its lunar free-return trajectory without reported anomalies [2].

The full crew press conference is scheduled for April 16 at 2:30 PM Eastern [2]. NASA has not released detailed mission debriefs ahead of that briefing, so the technical assessment of Orion's performance in crewed conditions remains pending.

The mission landed during a week dominated by the Iran war — a juxtaposition that received less coverage than the mission's historical significance warranted. The last time humans traveled this far, the Apollo program was about to be cancelled for a generation.

-- KENJI NAKAMURA, Tokyo