Mike Baker

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In today's Back of the Brief, the Artemis II crew has splashed down after a 10-day mission around the moon, bringing NASA back into human deep space flight for the first time in decades.

At 8.07 p.m.

Eastern Time on Friday, the Orion capsule, carrying NASA astronauts Reid Weissman, Christina Koch, Victor Glover, and Canadian astronaut Jeremy Hansen, came down in the Pacific Ocean just off the coast of San Diego, closing out NASA's first lunar mission in more than 50 years, taking humans farther into space than ever before.

As the capsule made its way back to Earth, it had to punch through the atmosphere at extreme speeds, approximately 25,000 miles an hour, with temperatures climbing to around 5,000 degrees Fahrenheit.

Now, that is about half the temperature of the sun's surface.

At that point, during the re-entry, there was a six-minute communications blackout.

It's the point where mission control is essentially holding their breath, waiting to re-establish comms and know that splashdown is imminent.

And over the radio, the world heard, Houston, integrity, we have you loud and clear, from Commander Wiseman, using the crew's name for their spacecraft.

Now, once the parachutes deployed and the capsule hit the water, U.S.

Navy recovery teams moved in to secure the area.

The astronauts were then helped out one by one and flown via helicopter to the USS John Murtaugh.

From there, they underwent initial medical checks before beginning the trip back to NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston.

And that's how the mission ended.

But to really understand what this mission means for NASA and for humanity and for future space exploration, I want to revisit what the four-member crew accomplished.

As Artemis II looped around the moon, this crew pushed farther into space than any humans in history, reaching a distance of over 252,000 miles from Earth.

That distance shatters the record set by Apollo 13 back in 1970, and it's worth remembering that 1970 mission hit that distance during an emergency return.

This time, it was planned.

They also did something no human crew had ever done before.

The astronauts observed the entire far side of the moon with their own eyes.