Discussion
Artemis II live updates as crew splashes down near San Diego after historic moon mission
java-man: I noticed a delay between video and audio - the announcer on the NASA official live broadcast said splashdown before the the capsule splashed down on video. Was it intentional (in case something happened)?Also, what were these puffs on thermal camera after the main chutes were deployed?https://www.youtube.com/live/m3kR2KK8TEs
hydrogen7800: My suspicion was they were burning excess propellant, rather than attitude adjustment while under the parachutes. Though who knows how much propellant remained. It could be quite a bit more than it appears was used.
darepublic: Cheers! Looking forward to future space travel!!
llbbdd: I was wondering about that too, I assume maybe there was some additional adjustments needed to land in the right spot, but they didn't mention it on the stream.
java-man: Yeah, they looked intentional - there are no reaction wheels on the capsule.
eqmvii: Held my breath the whole time after all the heat shield warnings. Very glad it all worked, or that there was enough margin!
Levitating: The LOS was also more than 6 minutes as predicted (I measured a bit over 7 minutes). What a tension.
llbbdd: I wasn't clear, was the LOS just comms or a full loss of telemetry from the craft? Either way, terrifying.
loloquwowndueo: Everything. No radio signals make it in or out of the capsule due to ionization from the heat and plasma of reentry.
shoghicp: RCS (Reaction Control System) which you can see on Artemis I internal video as it falls down https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-QbYrs5SZ5M
areoform: Glad that they're safe and sound.It's worth pointing out that this is the first extremely public, widely acknowledged high risk mission NASA has done in over 50 years. The Shuttle was risky, but it wasn't thought of or acknowledged by NASA as being risky until very late in its lifecycle.According to NASA's OIG, Artemis acceptable crew mortality rate is 1 in 30. Roughly 3x riskier than the shuttle. There genuinely is a world where they don't make it back home.I am grateful that they did. And I'm grateful that we're going to go even further. I can't wait to see what Jared's cooking up (for those who don't know, he made his own version of the Gemini program in Polaris and funded it out of pocket).
2OEH8eoCRo0: Ye of little faith! I'm glad they're safe!
devilbunny: Not just excess - excess and toxic. Hydrazine derivatives and nitrogen tetroxide, IIRC. They are hypergolic, too, so the easiest way to vent them is just to run the engines until empty. However, to prevent moving the craft too much, you do short bursts.
jonas21: If you want to see exactly where this is, you can track the locations of the of the Navy and NASA aircraft that are orbiting the vehicle:https://www.flightradar24.com/IMGRY21/3f2a2c63https://www.flightradar24.com/N926NA/3f2a084d
echoangle: Wild that they manage to fly to the moon but still seem to be having those comms problems. Asking the astronauts if they’re really pressing the PTT button is wild.
java-man: Good thing they have redundant systems.
llbbdd: "Reid Wiesman reporting all crew members green; that's not their complexion, all crew members are in good shape."
philistine: Dammit. I hoped Jeb was on board for a second.
kethinov: For All Mankind aired an episode today that movingly commemorated the fictional lead character Ed Baldwin's Apollo 10-like in-universe mission on the same day that the real world Artemis II mission which also strongly resembles Apollo 10 landed safely. A strange and moving coincidence.
carefree-bob: "NASA reporting four green crew members. That is not their complexion, it is that they are in good condition. That's what that means." LOL
sdoering: The humor was what really made my day today. Or in my case my night here in Germany.
philistine: I’d bet a million dollars that Orion will win every safety metric compared to the shuttle once it is retired. NASA deluded itself in thinking the Shuttle was safe. The reality is that the Shuttle was the most dangerous spaceship anyone ever built.
qrush: Apparently there's more work than just clicking "Recover Vessel" after splashdown!
shermantanktop: ...and informing them which button was the PTT button. She had to say it, but it'd be hard not to react to that.
BoredPositron: I don't know how to describe the feeling but it feels like a bad movie remake. Maybe I am just a sucker for practical effects and not 2020s CGI to stick with the metaphor and conspiracy (lol).
wewewedxfgdf: Cellphone coverage notoriously flaky in the Pacific.
elcapitan: This whole mission was amazing, and the most positive and hopeful thing I have seen as a global event in the last 5 years at least. Bravo and cheers to everyone involved :)
lysace: That speaker voice was a bit odd. Everything was perfect! At least one superlative every 5 seconds or so.
jrmg: It’s been amazing - and inspirational - watching the live stream of Mission Control and the capsule over the last ten days. Or at least having it as background audio. I’m going to miss all these folks I’ve grown to know.Bring on Artemis III and IV!
em-bee: also astronauts: "the moon is quite a bit smaller than it was yesterday"control: "i guess we'll have to go back".(paraphrased from memory)
rvz: Now this is actually for the benefit of humanity.
jrmg: …and this is how the America I thought I knew growing up projected its influence upon the world.
EdNutting: Notwithstanding that this mission critically relied upon Canada, UK, EU, Japan, Taiwan, and contributions from many other countries.
irjustin: > Artemis acceptable crew mortality rate is 1 in 30.This seems insane to me. That X decades later we accept, with all our advancements in tech, a weaker system than ever before. That if we send 30 people we _accept_ that one is possible to die.That's the starting point? That's what we document as acceptable?
Metacelsus: I guess they're not Kerbals :)
pwndByDeath: As a long time space nerd, I'm not sure what this accomplishes by repeating the previous stunts that failed to usher in the promised space frontier.Apollo was, IMO, not successful at changing the course of human history. A really cool footnote, sure, but everything else that was to follow, nope, just a bunch of neat, interesting but ultimately meh science missions.An exciting change would be more like Delta-V/Critical Mass, but NASA is not going to deliver that, at least not in any form it has taken thus far.
GeoPolAlt: At least now there’s something to celebrate for America’s 250th this year
Gagarin1917: Watching that capsule fall out of the sky at high speed from the teaching cameras was nerve wracking! Awesome footage, exciting to watch it live in such detail.
pictureofabear: An error in any of the orbital math may have seen them flung out into space with no chance of recovery.
rogerrogerr: If we're going to have a surveillance state, let's use it for superlative control - one dollar in taxes for every superlative you use in personal life; $0.01/viewer for each one you use in any live televised event.It's becoming a public hazard, we must act!
nodesocket: Amazing live video of the descent and splash down. Really awesome to watch!
atherton94027: This was the farthest humans ever travelled from earth, even farther than apollo 13. Intuitively the farther you go the higher the risks are
latchkey: Went out to the beach hoping to hear/see something, but sadly grey skies and no boom. Tons of other people out there doing the same thing too.
ggm: Dear NASA. Please dial back the poetics and rhetoric. Be more like ATC than Shakspear.
nodesocket: Umm it's a satellite phone.
627467: > That X decades later we accept, with all our advancements in tech, a weaker system than ever beforehow do you keep past performance while stop performing it for XY decades?
gct: Orbits do not work that way
ggm: The craft has aerodynamics and speed. It might be figuratively true "unrecoverable" but if it takes e.g. 2 weeks to complete a return, their oxygen and food and batteries ran out. Alternatively if it enters too fast they return ... in pieces.I think you're being a pedant, if your point is a grazing entry causing rebound skip ultimately returns to some orbital path downward.
philistine: I’ll note, since it is supremely interesting to me, that Starship is able to communicate with the ground during its whole reentry due to its sheer size and ability to connect with Starlink satellites. I assumed loss of signal due to reentry was a given for any spaceship!
TomatoCo: The space shuttle, too, was able to communicate. I imagine the smaller the craft the smaller the angle you can "speak" out of and, below a certain size, it just doesn't work.
brianjlogan: As an American I feel like I've been going through a bit of an identity crisis from what I remember growing up.Probably the rose tinted glasses of being a child but being from Florida I always had a sense of amazement and wonder as I heard the sonic boom of the shuttle returning to earth.Really felt like I was coexisting in this incredible scientific powerhouse of a country full of bright and enabled peoples that knew how to prioritize curiosity and innovation.Feeling like a bit of a "vibe" post which is everything wrong lately but I can't help but feel some satisfaction that we're still able to accomplish something like this in our space endeavors.
numpad0: [delayed]
Isolated_Routes: Ad astra per aspera
zhoujing204: "As of 1 April 2026, there have been five incidents in which a spacecraft in flight suffered crew fatalities, killing a total of 15 astronauts and 4 cosmonauts.[2][how?] Of these, two had reached the internationally recognized edge of space (100 km or 62mi above sea level) when or before the incident occurred, one had reached the U.S. definition of space at 266,000 ft, and one was planned to do so. In each of these accidents, the entire crew was killed. As of April 2026, a total of 791 people have flown into space and 19 of them have died in related incidents. This sets the current statistical fatality rate at 2.4 percent."[wiki link](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_spaceflight-related_ac...).-,During%20spaceflight,fatality%20rate%20at%202.4%20percent.)
mackman: You are comparing orbiting earth in a shuttle to a lunar flyby in a pod. Very different risk profiles.
sho_hn: Just like in the year 3000, we will still ask "Can you hear me?" in video meetings.
areoform: Yes, and the memories of Apollo are made rosy by hagiography. I even wrote an entire thing to explain why, https://1517.substack.com/p/1-in-30-artemis-greatness-and-ri... (yeah, shameless plug, sorry - it's more for the citations than not. You can read the standards and reports I've linked to)But if I'm allowed to repeat myself from elsewhere in the thread and the meat of the above thing,It's physically not possible at our current level of technology to make this "safer" due to the distances and energies involved. Even with the Commercial Cargo and Crew Program (C3P), NASA has set the acceptable mortality threshold at 1 in 270 over the entire mission and 1 in 1000 on ascent / descent. If they could set it higher by gaming the math, they would. They can't.We're a very primitive species, and the forces involved here are genuinely new. And no, Apollo wasn't much better either, at least 10 astronauts were killed in training or burned alive, as well as (far worse, because astronauts sign up for the risk) one member of ground staff.People love to hate the Shuttle, and it ended up being subpar / fail expectations due to the political constraints NASA was under, but the Shuttle was a genuine advance for its time – a nonsensical, economically insane advance, but still an advance. If you look at the Shuttle alternative proposals / initial proposals as well as stuff like Dynasoar and Star Raker, you'll see NASA iterating through Starship style ideas. But those were rejected due to higher up front capital investment at the time.The Shuttle is an odd franken-turduckling, because it was designed for one mission and one mission only. And that mission never happened. That cargo bay existed to capture certain Soviet assets and deploy + task certain American space assets and then bring them back to Earth.And that's the bit that's hard to emphasize. The fact that the Shuttle could put a satellite up there, watch it fail, then go back up, grab it, bring it back, repair it, then launch again was an insane capability.Was the program a giant fuck up at the end? Yes. But does that mean Artemis will be safer than the Shuttle? No. That's not how the energetics, time from civilization, acceptable risk profiles etc. work out.Shameless plug, wrote a bit about the Apollo hagiography, Artemis and risk here –
christophilus: Announcer just said “we just reenacted” the last Apollo mission. So, yep. That’ll be used as proof-text that this was all staged.
decimalenough: I get that there are people who think the moon landing was staged, but are there really people who think rocket launches are staged? Because it's pretty easy to go witness one yourself.
mgfist: I think we've all become to numb and jaded. This is the first moon mission in 50 years and the furthest any human has ever been from Earth.
collinmcnulty: Watching this, I can only describe it as holy. An incredible reminder of what humanity can do, and the beauty of our curiosity and the universe around us. I grew up learning that my great uncle was in Mission Control for Apollo; missions like this are what inspired me to pursue engineering in the first place.
lysace: Agreed.
Rebelgecko: It seems like they had limited telemetry for a short period before they did any audio
rmunn: Best comment exchange from a thread on a different site:OP: "I'm happy they didn't die."Response: "You're going to be less happy when they turn into the Fantastic Four and Dr. Doom shows up."
420official: You seem to intentionally be ignoring the original quote that any error may have caused them to be flung into space. This is patently false unless the one math error is pumping in hundreds of pounds more propellant and burning far longer than the scheduled burns. NASA would need to make a significant series of mistakes beyond orbital math for the "flung out into space" statement to be true.They certainly could've gotten the return wrong but with a perigee of 119 miles they arent even in a stable orbit and likely could deorbit themselves using only rcs thrusters at apogee, or by just waiting a few orbits.
marssaxman: How could a comparison between such dissimilar programs ever be meaningful? NASA flew 135 Shuttle missions over the course of 30 years; Orion will be doing well to approach a tenth of that number.
atonse: I had to explain to my wife and kids (not that I'm in this field, but I also have to remind myself) that we are able to pinpoint where the craft will land, when it will land down to the minute, because of ... just ... math. And we're able to get them there and back because of science.It all boils down to equations that describe the world accurately, and a way of experimentation, iteration, thinking that gets us all the way to do something this unbelievably complex.
lenerdenator: Been a long time since I've felt any amount of national pride like this. Welcome home.
Ifkaluva: Can somebody help me understand why this does a water landing, like the old Apollo missions, instead of like the space shuttle that lands like a plane?
JumpCrisscross: Buoyancy is an easier equation to solve than lift.
rootusrootus: I was wondering about that, so I looked up the heat shield issues. It seems like their solution was very defensible and there was every reason to believe it would work out just fine. The plan that did not work as they wanted had a new idea, a double re-entry, and when the results were concerning they backed off to using a traditional single re-entry. That seems like a legitimate fix?
thegrim33: Yes, but it was the biggest opening for propagandists to latch on to for demoralizing and spreading fear/uncertainty/doubt about the mission.
rootusrootus: Indeed, the world is so grim these days that I welcome even a little bit of relief, a little bit of hope for a better future.
Ifkaluva: And the printer will be perpetually broken
paulgerhardt: First couple of crews to orbit the earth at 0’ AGL had mortality rate of 9 in 10.I’d say we’re doing better!
1970-01-01: So the new heat shield works just fine, and NASA still knows things better than arm-chair aerospace engineers? Safety third.
dingaling: 1 hour 29 minutes seems excessive to extract the astronauts; if any of them _did_ have a medical issue they'd be in for a long wait.The commentary said that the initial problems with the boats approaching Integrity was due to an unexpected swell. Unexpected, in the Pacific?
EdNutting: So why do they need to use helicopters and a risky airlift to return the astronauts to the main vessel? Why not just use the speedboats to take them back? Seems really odd and I can’t find any reasonable explanation.
fooker: It’s statistically unsound to compare results of low probability events like this.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texas_sharpshooter_fallacy
throwanem: That was the fair estimate for the Shuttle program. NASA caught hell in public, justifiably, for pretending otherwise. But astronaut memoirs such as Mullane's excellent Riding Rockets paint a much more nuanced picture.I waited until splashdown to permit my emotions to get involved, and I'm glad I did. It was really something earlier, to hear my whole neighborhood bar set up a cheer for an American mission to the Moon.
stackghost: Aerospace engineer here, though I do air-breathing work, not space.The simple answer is that the Shuttle form factor is complex.A small Apollo-style capsule that parachutes into the ocean has a simpler mission profile, which allows for simpler technical and operational requirements, which in turn reduces program cost.
dingaling: Artemis rides on extended versions of the same SRBs that made the Shuttle ascent so dangerous.
llbbdd: Would this capsule had been been able to communicate if it was integrated with starlink or is the size more important? I'd imagine if they could have achieved communication via Starlink they would have done it, but just curious.
albumen: No, the plasma forms a teardrop shape around small craft like Orion, completely cutting off radio comms. Larger craft like starship or the shuttle which have a roughly cylindrical shape (vs Orion’s circular cross section) aren’t fully enclosed by the plasma. The shuttle had a transmitter attached to its tail for later flights, which could send back telemetry during re-entry.
llbbdd: Awesome, thank you! I wonder if some kind of very long-tethered deployed antenna could enable this for the capsule or if the ratio of long-enough-to-work vs thick-enough-to-not-burn-off-completely just doesn't work. Time to read about the shuttle.
trothamel: That was a great article.Adding to it - Apollo 13 was a mission where 3 men should have died, but somehow didn't. If it had happened while the LM was on the moon, you would have had the CSM lose power, and then two men on the moon would have had no way to return home.(And for the shuttle design mission - my understanding is it was likely the ability to do a HEXAGON-style film return mission in a single orbit, before the Soviets knew what was happeneing.)
areoform: Thanks!note - I can't verify any of the following, it's more - for lack of a better term - aerospace nerd fan theory at this point.Post-collapse, people think that the Buran justification was paranoia. But based on what I've read / seen (though this is getting hard to source, so I might be just good ol' hallucinating here), they weren't entirely wrong. The subtext around that large payload bay had to do with the Soviet pursuit of systems like Fractional Orbital Bombardment System (FOBS) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fractional_Orbital_Bombardment... that weaponized space.Again, there's a reason for those ASAT tests. There's a reason for the weird specifications set in the early 1970s for the Shuttle. And I don't think deploying a spy satellite alone is it. But this is speculation. AFAICT, nothing was put on paper.It would have been an incendiary WW3 starting act to capture a Soviet asset. But I think it is understandable if certain people within the American blob wanted that capability at hand.I wish I was immortal. I'd drop everything for a decade and try to find people from the time who're still alive (and some still are!) and ask them these questions directly - on the record – for posterity's sake. I suspect, we came much closer to war via space than most people think. And because we didn't, we'll eventually repeat these mistakes.---Oh and then there was the documented attempt to capture Salyut-7 https://www.thespacereview.com/article/2554/1Somehow all the numbers just happened to line right up. :)
Neywiny: I can see your comment, can you see mine?
Waterluvian: Space flight safety is a function of culture and I don’t have any confidence that the culture has improved.
gerdesj: I think we are a long way along from digging out Dr Feynman to look into why a shuttle exploded.Unless you happen to have some deep links into NASA, in which case please elucidate us all, then why not celebrate a happy and safe return from a sodding dangerous mission that involved things like >25,000 mph relative velocity and some remarkable navigation.When you depart earth (close quarters gravity, air resistance, things in the way), everything moves really fast, really fast and any acceleration becomes an issue really ... fast!The moon moves, the earth moves: both famously in some sort of weird dance around each other and both orbit around the sun. Obviously the moon affects the earth way less than vice versa but it still complicates things.I think that NASA did a remarkable job of making Artemis II look almost routine and I don't think that was down to behaving as they did in the past.
anonymars: > I think that NASA did a remarkable job of making Artemis II look almost routine and I don't think that was down to behaving as they did in the past.I have been excited for Artemis--yes it's big and expensive and late, but look how it has brought out the best of what humans can be--but, despite all that, the heat shield situation was textbook "normalization of deviance." Just as the O-rings were not designed to have any damage but they retroactively justified it was okay, just as there was not supposed to be any foam or tile damage but they retroactively justified it was okay, so too was the Artemis I heat shield not supposed to come back with damage, but they...I'm not trying to be negative, and risks are inevitable, but the resemblance to me was uncanny. The lesson with normalization of deviance is that a successful result does not inherently mean a safe decision. After all, most of the time that you play Russian Roulette you will escape unharmed.
allenrb: My friends and I have been deriving much amusement from the comms issues. We can fly people around the moon, talk with them, send back high res video, but talk to the boat that’s close enough to swim to? Forget about it!Note: next time, pack a walkie talkie. ;-)
chrisweekly: No joke, VHF has been saving sailors' lives for a long time now.
_moof: Helicopter -> large boat is much easier, and much faster, than small boat -> large boat.
bombcar: They missed the chance to reply "Main screen turn on."
bombcar: The analogies for these things like "hitting a golf ball into a hole in one 5,000 miles away" are always fun.I like starting from the fact that Ptolemy was able to get the accuracy of the "motions of the heavens" down so well that it took more than a thousand years to get observations that showed discrepancies. The math, it maths.
stackghost: >Buoyancy is an easier equation to solve than lift.Not really. Subsonic lift is well understood and has been for decades. The answer is much more mundane: The Artemis mission profile does not require payload doors that open, no Canadarm, no requirement to service, launch, and/or capture satellites in orbit, and so like good engineers they designed the minimum vehicle that satisfies the requirements.
llbbdd: I think especially online there's a lot of emphasis on "everything is wrong". A mission like this is hard to ignore and highlights the bias. On the whole, despite setbacks, we continue.
simplyluke: If you want to dispel a bit more of the ever-pervasive online pessimism bias, read up on global rates of hunger the last time we flew to the moon (1972) vs now. The reality is, for all the problems we face today, there's no sane answer other than today to the question "when would you prefer to be born as a random person on earth"
bombcar: There's a lot of money/hay/political power/etc to be made from "everything is wrong" - it's hard for "good news" to really get into your bones.Not to say it's the best of times, nor to say it's the worst of times, mind you. Just that it's really hard to objectively compare.
Culonavirus: It's the shape and size.Also Orion and other capsules fall like a rock (steep reentry profile ) compared to shuttle/starship, which intentionally slow down the reentry and kinda glide (ballpark 10min with capsules compared to 30min with shuttle/starship).tl;dr: capsules get fully enveloped in plasma due to their shape, size and reentry profile
bombcar: Was any shuttle lost to the SRBs?
throwanem: The only people who took seriously the idea of a Shuttle FOBS were the Soviets, and frankly not even all of them; as far as I've ever seen credible evidence to substantiate, it never went much past a single position paper from the early 80s. The idea that Buran was meant as a MAD-restoring FOBS has, so far as I know, not even that much support. (If you know of original sources, in translation or otherwise, please link them.)Read Payne Harrison's 1989 novel Storming Intrepid, followed by NASA publication SP-4221, "The Space Shuttle Decision." The first is a pretty good depiction of what you're imagining, and the second explains why imagination is where that idea died. Then maybe give your head a shake. If Reagan had violated the Outer Space Treaty - via NASA of all agencies! - do you really think it'd have stayed secret for forty years? - the past forty years?
bombcar: The space shuttle landed like something resembling a plane, but it is more accurate to say it landed like a concrete brick traveling faster than the speed of sound.Splashdown-style landings are the simplest and safest, parachutes are always good but adding water makes for another layer of safety (and of risk, to be fair, it could sink).
bombcar: Someone hasn't stayed awake all night listening to YouTube ATC. I recommend Kennedy Steve.
stackghost: >Why not just use the speedboats to take them back?They actually covered this in the broadcast: Helicopters are faster to get the astronauts to medical, smoother in rough seas, and there's less risk of being swamped by a rogue wave. Plus, since the astronauts might have fatigue/muscle atrophy/whatever, it complicates potential boat transfers.
