Artemis II, first mission around the Moon since 1972 successfully returned

The Orion spacecraft is built for the space agency primarily Lockheed, but with the service module (electricity, propulsion and vital systems) built by the European Space Agency. It is equipped for deep space exploration, part of the Artemis programme to the Moon and beyond. In contrast, the Crew Dragon of Elon Musk's SpaceX, smaller, agile and primarily assigned to a kind of space taxi service, for low orbits and connections with the International Space Station. Orion, 57% larger than the original NASA Apollo spacecraft, is in particular capable of withstanding extremely high temperatures on re-entry into the Earth's atmosphere.

The mission crew consisted of the Americans Christina Koch, Victor Glover and Reid Wiseman (the commander), together with the Canadian Jeremy Hansen. The re-entry took place in a complex procedure called 'skip reentry'. This is a two-stage operation in which the spacecraft enters the atmosphere, ascends slightly and then re-enters again. This reduces stress on the astronauts and improves trajectory accuracy with controlled deceleration. In the final stage, the parachutes then opened, three last ones, to allow ditching into the ocean.

The most delicate moment is considered to be the impact with the atmosphere. The capsule reached a speed of close to 40,000 kilometres per hour (to be exact a maximum of 24,661 miles per hour, second only to that of Apollo 10 in 1969), or almost 11 kilometres per second, generating a plasma cloud with temperatures of up to 2,700 degrees. The protective shield built for the mission is charged with dispersing this heat for about eight minutes, the duration of the most critical phase in which all communication with the mission headquarters in Houston, Texas, is also cut off. Once the most delicate moment has passed, at an altitude of about 7,500 metres the braking parachutes, which brought the capsule to a re-entry speed of less than 30 km/h on impact with the water, will open.