Suspended under parachutes, an astronaut capsule without astronauts made a gentle splash in the Pacific Ocean on Sunday, bringing NASA’s Artemis I moon mission to a close.
The end of the uncrewed test flight coincided with the 50th anniversary of the landing of Apollo 17 on the moon, the last time that NASA astronauts walked there.
The Artemis program is the successor to Apollo, and after years of delays and a mounting price tag, the new rocket and spacecraft that will take astronauts back to the moon worked about as smoothly as mission managers could have hoped.
“If you asked me to grade it, I’d give us an A-plus,” Catherine Koerner, the deputy associate administrator for exploration systems development at NASA said on NASA Television as Orion approached Earth Sunday morning. “We’ve been learning how the spacecraft operates, and we’ve been learning how to fly this amazing machine.”
The moon trip capped a year of spectacular successes for NASA. Its James Webb Space Telescope, which launched almost a year ago, began sending back breathtaking images of the cosmos this summer. Its DART mission showed in September that slamming into an asteroid on purpose could protect Earth in the future if a deadly space rock is discovered on a collision course with our planet.
With the conclusion of Artemis I, more attention will shift toward SpaceX, the private rocket company founded by Elon Musk. NASA is relying on a version of Starship, the company’s next-generation spacecraft that has not yet flown to space, to land astronauts on the moon.
On Sunday, just after noon Eastern time, the Orion crew capsule — where astronauts will sit during future flights — reentered the Earth’s atmosphere at 24,600 mph. This was the mission’s last major objective: to demonstrate that the capsule’s heat shield could withstand the searing temperatures as it slammed into air molecules.
By design, the capsule bounced off the upper layer of air before reentering a second time. It was the first time that a capsule designed for astronauts had performed this maneuver, known as a skip-entry, which enables more precise steering toward the landing site.
At approximately 12:40 p.m., the capsule settled in the Pacific Ocean off Mexico’s Baja peninsula. Because of bad weather near San Diego, NASA had shifted the landing site about 350 miles to the south.
The capsule and the Space Launch System, a giant new rocket, are key pieces of Artemis, which aims to land astronauts on the moon near its south pole as early as 2025.
During the 26 days of Artemis I, glitches popped up as expected, but the flight appeared to be devoid of major malfunctions that would require a lengthy investigation and redesign.
“It’s a great demonstration that this stuff works,” said Daniel L. Dumbacher, the executive director of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics. Dumbacher oversaw early work on the Space Launch System more than a decade ago when he was a top human spaceflight official at NASA.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times .
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