ORLANDO, Fla. — NASA chased down the Orion spacecraft after its record-breaking reentry into Earth’s atmosphere Sunday to conclude the Artemis I mission that lifted off from Kennedy Space Center more than three weeks ago.
“And there it is, high over the Pacific, America’s new ticket to ride to the moon and beyond now in view,” said Rob Navias with NASA communications as the first images of the capsule emerged descending under three unfurled main parachutes 1,000 feet above the water’s surface.
It made contact at 12:40 and 30 seconds a.m. EST after 25 days, 10 hours and 54 minutes and 50 seconds, unofficially.
“Splashdown. 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,” Navias said referencing the landing sites of Apollo 13 and Apollo 17, the first and last human landings on the moon. Sunday happened to be the 50th anniversary of Apollo 17′s touchdown on Dec. 11, 1972.
Recovery teams led by KSC’s Exploration Ground Systems were on hand to welcome back the uncrewed Orion capsule after landing near Guadalupe Island off the coast of Baja California south of San Diego. Teams will prep the capsule to be loaded onto the deck of the U.S.S. Portland for a trip back to San Diego. The ship was within 6 miles of the capsule and early reports stated the capsule showed no damage.
“The target for Orion is growing larger in the field of view moment by moment,” said Navias said as NASA TV began airing the return Sunday morning. “It is homecoming day.”
The return velocity saw Orion hit the atmosphere at a reported 24,464 mph, which is faster than any previous human-rated spacecraft.
The primary goal of the uncrewed Artemis I mission is to ensure Orion’s heat shied can withstand the nearly 5,000 degrees Fahrenheit temperature generated by reentry and open the door for NASA to proceed with Artemis II, which aims to send four astronauts on an orbital moon mission no earlier than May 2024. That would then be followed by Artemis III no earlier than 2025, which would return humans, including the first woman, to the lunar surface for the first time since Apollo 17 in 1972.
Orion performed its sixth and final return trajectory correction burn Sunday morning to ensure it’s headed to the correct landing site. At noon Orion, at about 3,200 miles altitude, separated from its service module that has been providing propulsion during its trip around the moon and back.
At 12:20, Orion then began to carve its way through the atmosphere at about 400,000 feet altitude and 3,659 miles from the target landing site making it away across the South Pacific Ocean.
“Orion will dip into the Earth’s atmosphere and begin what basically is a hellish entry where temperatures around the spacecraft will raise to about 5,000 degrees Fahrenheit,” Navias said. “That’s half as hot as the outer surface of the sun.”
The dip maneuver is similar to skipping a rock on a pond, Navias said, that slowed the spacecraft down further ahead a planned parachute-assisted landing and recovery by a fleet of vessels that have been readying for Orion’s arrival since last week.
“Flight dynamics reports Orion straight and narrow on a true course to its splashdown site,” Navias said with video images on NASA’s livestream with nearly 250,000 people watching that showed the cloudy skies of Earth from the capsule’s point of view.
“It’s just another day in the park for us,” said Navy Diver 1st Class Wayne Shearer. “We’ve trained for the last year and a half for us. We’ve been in worse seas than this recovering anything under the water. It’s just different, instead of recovering something from under the water, we’ll be recovering something that fell from the sky.”
Both Orion and the Space Launch System rocket that brought it into space have been ticking off NASA’s checkboxes for mission objectives on its 1.4 million mile trip.
Orion became the record holder for human-rated spacecraft flying to more than 268,000 miles away from Earth during a distant retrograde orbit of the moon, and SLS became the most powerful rocket to ever make it into space when it blasted off from KSC on Nov. 16, generating 8.8 million pounds of thrust in an overnight launch that lit up the Space Coast.
The first SLS flight was originally targeted for 2016 after the program was announced in 2012, but cost overruns and delays from COVID-19, hurricanes and manufacturing complexities kept pushing the target launch window to 2022. NASA then had to plow through a bevy of launch pad fueling snafus during testing and launch attempts as well as the interpolation of both hurricanes Ian and Nicole before finally making off the ground.
Once in the air, though, the mission plan proceeded without any serious issues so that NASA now has a flight-proven rocket to support its deep-space plans including send the first human to Mars by 2040.
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