Relive Orion’s historic homecoming exactly two years ago

It was two years ago on December 11 when NASA’s Orion spacecraft splashed down in the Pacific Ocean west of Baja California in a mission that effectively marked the launch of the space agency’s ambitious Artemis program, which plans to send astronauts back to the moon and construct a permanent lunar base.

NASA shared several images of the homecoming on its Orion Spacecraft social media account on Wednesday.

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Orion splashed down in the Pacific Ocean on this day in 2022, at the end of its 25.5-day mission around the Moon on #Artemis I, totaling 1.4M mi (2.6M km).

After investigating how the heat shield fared, we are preparing for Artemis II, launching 2026. More:… pic.twitter.com/TJ2qx55bO9

— Orion Spacecraft (@NASA_Orion) December 11, 2024

The Artemis I mission got underway from the Kennedy Space Center on November 16, 2022, when NASA’s Space Launch System (SLS) rocket, on its first flight, powered the uncrewed Orion capsule to space in a crucial test of its onboard systems.

Five days later, Orion made its first flyby of the moon, coming within just 80 miles of the lunar surface before reaching the furthest distance from Earth ever traveled by an astronaut-ready vehicle. The distance of about 268,553 miles surpassed the previous record for a human-rated spacecraft set by Apollo 13 in 1970, which reached 248,655 miles (400,171 kilometers) from Earth.

Orion successfully traveled back to Earth to complete its historic flight on December 11, 2022.

As this was a test mission, it’s little surprise that a number of issues came to light, and which had to addressed. One of the most concerning was a problem with Orion’s heatshield, which protects the spacecraft and its occupants as it reenters Earth’s atmosphere at high speed. Engineers observed greater deterioration than expected in the heatshield, and are continuing to work on resolving the issue.

The ongoing work is one of the reasons why NASA recently announced it was delaying the Artemis II mission from 2025 to no earlier than 2026. The news came as a disappointment to those following the progress of the Artemis program, but the successful completion of Artemis I showed that NASA’s next-generation deep-space exploration systems were close to being ready, and gave engineers plenty of data to work with to refine those systems and improve them even further.