NOTE: Live coverage of splashdown will appear in the player above once an NBC News Special Report begins.
Artemis II is set for a dramatic return on Friday evening, as astronauts race back to Earth at thousands of miles per hour.
The crew is relying on a heat shield that is under scrutiny, navigating a communications blackout and deploying parachutes for a precise ocean landing.
The tension in Mission Control continued to mount as the miles melted away between the four returning astronauts and Earth. Friday’s splashdown is scheduled for 7:07 p.m. CT.
Like so many others, lead flight director Jeff Radigan anticipated feeling some of that “irrational fear that is human nature,” especially during the six minutes of communication blackout preceding the opening of the parachutes. The recovery ship USS John P. Murtha awaited the crew’s arrival off the coast of San Diego, along with a squadron of military planes and helicopters.
The Artemis II crew is heading into the most dangerous part of their mission, a fiery reentry where extreme heat, a brief communication blackout and a parachute deployment have to go exactly right. NBC 5’s Christian Farr reports on the risks.
While acknowledging anxiety over Friday’s return, NASA Associate Administrator Amit Kshatriya said the crew’s “expressions of love and devotion to family” have warmed hearts worldwide and served as “a great example of why we go and do these missions.”
”If you can’t take love to the stars, then what are we doing?” he said. “That’s why we send humans instead of robots sometimes, that’s why we have that firsthand witness.”
Mission Control will be paying close attention to how the capsule’s heat shield holds up. During the only other Orion test flight to the moon — in 2022 without a crew — the heat shield suffered considerably more damage than expected from the 5,000 degrees Fahrenheit of reentry.
Instead of replacing Artemis II’s heat shield, which would have forced another lengthy delay, NASA tweaked the capsule’s descent through the atmosphere to reduce the blisteringly hot exposure. Next year’s Artemis III and beyond will fly with redesigned heat shields.
Joseph Fernando Gonzalez, associate professor of practice in aerospace engineering at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, is among those who will be watching closely.
The Artemis II crew – in their Orion spaceship – has been packing and reviewing procedures for what will be a fiery return to Earth.
Their trek will hopefully lead to more missions to the moon and other places.
“We have an architecture and an infrastructure to have subsequent missions so that we can go back to the moon, to not only visit for a few days, but to establish a presence, to establish a community where we can continue to further science, continue to further the curiosity of of technology, of sciences as humans like to explore, and after we’ve practiced all of that on the moon, our goal will shift to going to Mars,” Fernando Gonzalez said.