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The crew of Artemis II is set to return to earth on Friday following its historic 10-day lunar flyby mission, and Nasa leaders have described the precise logistics needed to get them home.
The return will see the Orion capsule traveling at nearly 24,000mph before making a final splashdown several miles off the coast of San Diego. The operation requires multiple teams and careful coordination to safely extract the crew from the spacecraft.
Speaking at a press conference on Thursday, Nasa’s associate administrator Amit Kshatriya said: “To every engineer, every technician that’s touched this machine, tomorrow belongs to you. The crew has done their part. Now we have to do ours.”
Jeff Radigan, lead flight director of the mission, emphasized the precision required for re-entry, noting the team has “less than a degree of an angle” to hit the correct flight path. “Let’s not beat around the bush. We have to hit that angle correctly – otherwise we’re not going to have a successful re-entry,” he said.
Radigan outlined the timeline for the spacecraft’s return. The Orion crew module and service module are set to separate at 4.33pm PT (7.33pm ET, 12.33am UK time), with the service module burning up in Earth’s atmosphere. This will be followed by a crew module raise burn at 4.37pm PT, and Orion’s entry interface at 4.53pm PT, which will cause a brief blackout. Drogue parachutes are set to deploy at about 5.03pm PT, followed by main parachutes, before a final splashdown at 5.07pm PT.
He added that the splashdown will occur far off the southern California coast. “The path that we’re coming in, I don’t expect it to be visible from the folks in California … We’re working with the Department of War to recover the capsule out there and it is a fairly large exclusion zone so I would caution folks … please avoid the area,” Radigan said.
“There’s a lot of debris that comes down and we work with our recovery forces in order to ensure that it doesn’t hit them,” he added.
Branelle Rodriguez, the mission’s Orion vehicle manager, explained the type of debris expected during splashdown: “When the crew module comes back in, the forward bay cover, which is the very top of the crew module, actually comes off and that pulls out your first set of parachutes.” She said three sets of parachutes come out and as each gets released they fall into the “keep-out zone that the team has out in the water”, which the public must stay away from.
The USS John P Murtha is ready to assist with recovery operations, which will unfold in several stages and are expected to take between an hour and an hour and a half. “There’s a number of systems that we have to begin an orderly shutdown, and the crew then has to orient themselves and begin ‘safing’ the spacecraft so they can open the hatch, and that takes a little bit of time,” Radigan said.
He added that recovery teams must initially remain at a safe distance. “In parallel, of course, the recovery forces … do have to stay out a fair number of miles because there’s debris that comes off.”
“Once we confirm that there’s no risk … which takes a matter of minutes, then they’re able to approach the spacecraft and begin the process of extracting the crew … It takes a little bit of time to get the recovery forces into the capsule and then help the crew to get out of the capsule and on to the front porch, which is the flotation part of the recovery forces that actually attaches to the spacecraft,” Radigan said.
After extraction, the crew will undergo post-mission medical evaluations before being flown to Nasa’s Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas.
Thursday’s press conference followed a late briefing on Wednesday, during which the Artemis II crew reflected on their journey.
Pilot Victor Glover, the first Black man to travel beyond low Earth orbit, said: “We have to get back. There’s so much data that you’ve seen already, but all the good stuff is coming back with us. There are so many more pictures, so many more stories.” He added: “Riding a fireball through the atmosphere is profound as well.”
Meanwhile, mission commander Reid Wiseman, whose wife Carroll died of brain cancer in 2020 and had the team name a crater after her during the trip, said: “There’s a lot that our brains have to process … and it is a true gift.”
He added that the 40-minute communication blackout the crew experienced earlier this week while flying behind the moon’s far side was “surreal”.
