"It's 13 minutes of things that have to go right," NASA said of the reentry and splashdown, the first with astronauts from the moon in over 50 years.

The most dangerous part of the Artemis II astronauts' mission will happen when the Orion spacecraft returns to Earth and splashes down into the Pacific Ocean on Friday.

Astronauts Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, Christina Koch, and Jeremy Hansen landed a couple hundred miles off the coast of San Diego, with no issues immediately detected. They’ll return to Houston in the coming days.

They were flying a spacecraft that had never carried crew before and entering the atmosphere on a trajectory that had never been attempted before, protected by a heat shield that had caused engineers worry ever since the flight of Artemis I in 2022.