After blazing new records near the moon, Artemis II’s astronauts completed humanity’s first lunar voyage in more than half a century with a Pacific splashdown on Friday, a dramatic grand finale to a mission that revealed not only swaths of the lunar far side never seen before by human eyes but also a total solar eclipse and a parade of planets, most notably our own shimmering Earth.
With their flight now complete, the four astronauts have set NASA up for a moon landing by another crew in just two years and a full-blown moon base within the decade.
