Artemis II Comes Home

Welcome to MVAP’s live coverage of the re-entry, splashdown and recovery of NASA’s Artemis II mission. The splashdown is scheduled for 2007 EDT.

Artemis II astronauts have traveled 252,756 miles from Earth, flown around the Moon, and observed the lunar surface like never before. Now, they’re coming home.

The Artemis 2 crew, returning from a lunar flyby, is doing something they’ve never done with people on board.

Orion is flying at 40,000 km/h. At that speed, the atmosphere isn’t air, it’s a wall. You can’t just dive down—the crew would be crushed by the G-forces, and the ship would burn up. So they came up with this idea. Orion will enter the atmosphere, heat up to 2800 degrees, and bounce back into space. Like a pebble bounces off water. Remember throwing flat stones down a river as a kid? Up there, it has a couple of minutes to cool down. Then it reenters and lands.

The trick is that such a jump drops the G-forces from 10g to 4g. The difference between tolerable and done. The Apollo missions returned differently. They didn’t jump, they simply glided through the upper atmosphere like a skier down a hill, gradually losing speed. One pass and that’s it. It worked, but the G-forces were severe.

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