Artemis II Splashes Down Tonight Off San Diego Coast
The Artemis II crew is coming home, and they’re landing in our backyard.
NASA’s Orion capsule is scheduled to splash down at 5:07 p.m. PDT today off the coast of San Diego, capping a 694,481-mile journey that included the first crewed lunar flyby since 1972. Astronauts Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, Christina Koch, and Canadian Space Agency astronaut Jeremy Hansen have spent the past ten days putting Orion’s deep-space systems through their paces before the fiery finale of re-entry and splashdown.
At 4:53 p.m., Orion will separate from its service module and orient its heat shield earthward. When it hits the upper atmosphere at 400,000 feet, traveling at roughly 35 times the speed of sound, the capsule will generate temperatures around 3,000 degrees Fahrenheit and go dark for about six minutes as plasma builds around the hull. The crew will pull up to 3.9 Gs during the descent profile, with drogue chutes deploying around 22,000 feet, mains at 6,000 feet, and splashdown following shortly after at an estimated 20 mph. It’s worth watching if you can position yourself for it.
Where to look from San Diego
The re-entry ground track puts Orion approaching from the west-southwest, so your best viewing angle is from any west-facing coastal spot with a clear horizon: Sunset Cliffs, Ocean Beach, Point Loma, or the Cabrillo National Monument overlook. If the geometry lines up, you may catch a bright streak or fireball moving across the sky in the minutes before 5 p.m., possibly trailing a plasma glow. Marine layer and approach angle will dictate what’s actually visible, but conditions this afternoon look favorable. An elevated spot will help.
Recovery operations will be run by a joint NASA and U.S. military team. Once in the water, the crew will be extracted by helicopter and delivered to the USS John P. Murtha for post-mission medical evaluations.
Live coverage starts at 3:30 p.m. PDT on NASA+, Amazon Prime, Netflix, and most major streaming platforms, which means you can watch the re-entry live if the sky view doesn’t cooperate.
