After making history as the farthest journey into space humans have ever made, NASA’s Artemis II mission returned to Earth on Friday, splashing down off the coast southwest of San Diego.

The Artemis II crew splashed down successfully at 5:07:47 p.m. PT. The Orion spacecraft launched last week from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, the first crewed flight to the moon in more than 50 years. The entire mission from liftoff took a total of nine days, one hour, 31 minutes and 35 seconds, which NASA rounds up, to call it a 10-day mission.

In the buildup to the mission, questions about the craft’s heat shield led to concerns among some experts about whether Orion would hold up on reentry to the Earth’s atmosphere, the most perilous part of any crewed mission. A NASA-commissioned panel ultimately deemed the ship safe, with the astronauts themselves endorsing it ahead of time.

The four-member crew — NASA astronauts Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover and Christina Koch, along with Canadian Space Agency astronaut Jeremy Hansen — embarked on the 10-day mission to fly around the moon, setting the stage for future missions aimed at establishing a permanent lunar base.

After splashdown, NASA administrator Jared Isaacman praised the crew, calling them “wonderful communicators, almost poets,” during an interview Friday evening.

“These were the ambassadors from humanity to the starts that we sent out there,” Isaacman said.

He also emphasized that this mission set the stage for a future moon landing — and base.

“This is not a once in a lifetime … This is just the beginning,” he said during the interview. “We are going to get back into doing this with frequency, sending missions to the moon, until we land on it in 2028 and start building our base.”

On April 6, the spacecraft reached 252,756 miles from Earth, the farthest distance traveled by humans. Artemis II broke the Apollo 13 crew’s record of 248,655 miles, set in 1970.

The crew conducted a seven-hour lunar flyby, coming within about 4,000 miles of the moon’s surface and seeing areas of the moon never before seen by the naked eye. In addition to testing the spacecraft, the astronauts studied the far side of the moon during a solar eclipse and observed lunar geological features and color variations.

Now back on Earth, the astronauts will undergo medical evaluations before heading to shore and traveling to NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston.

The next such mission, Artemis III, is expected to launch next year.

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