The farthest journey in human history concluded Friday evening when NASA’s Artemis II astronauts returned to Earth after a flight around the moon. The crew’s Orion space capsule named Integrity splashed down in the Pacific Ocean off the coast of San Diego shortly after 5 pm Pacific Time, marking the end of a 10-day, more than 695,000-mile voyage beyond the lunar far side and back. The four-person crew of Artemis II—commander Reid Wiseman, pilot Victor Glover, mission specialist Christina Koch, and mission-specialist Jeremy Hansen—traveled a greater distance from Earth than ever before, reaching 252,756 miles from our home planet. “We most importantly choose this moment to challenge this generation and the next to make sure this record is not long-lived,” said Canadian astronaut Hansen as the crew passed the previous record of 248,655 miles set during Apollo 13. Integrity began its fiery descent when the spacecraft hit Earth’s atmosphere at about 24,000 miles per hour, entering a communication blackout and decelerating from friction as its heat shield reached temperatures of roughly 3,000 degrees Fahrenheit. The plan was for the capsule to deploy two drogue parachutes at an altitude of about 22,000 feet, slowing it to about 200 miles per hour, then deploy pilot chutes pulling the three main parachutes at roughly 6,000 feet. This would further slow the spacecraft to around 20 miles per hour before it splashed into the ocean. During their mission, the Artemis II crew saw things that no human has seen before. Flying higher above the lunar surface than the Apollo missions, the astronauts were the first people to see the entire disk of the moon’s far side. They also witnessed a solar eclipse from the vicinity of the moon as the sun slipped behind the lunar disk and illuminated it from behind. “Humans probably have not evolved to see what we are seeing,” said NASA astronaut Glover during the eclipse. He and the rest of the crew described a halo of light surrounding th