Natasha

Neil Armstrong and the Apollo astronauts trained for landing on the moon right here at the gantry. Incredible! @NASA_Langley

It's very moving to me that Commander Reid Wiseman, the last of the #ArtemisII astronauts to exit Integrity, made sure to bring the plushie Rise - and the 5 million names it carries - back with him immediately upon landing. Every one of those names completed the mission with him.

On the helicopter leaving the ship right now. This planet is impossibly beautiful from every altitude I’ve seen it…surface to 250,000 miles

@anishmoonka And to think people didn’t think he was qualified because he paid for his ride in space! He’s one of the best admins we’ve had!

Jared Isaacman dropped out of high school at 16 and started a company in his parents' basement with $10,000 his grandfather gave him. Tonight he's on the deck of a Navy ship, waiting to welcome four astronauts home from the moon. That basement company is now Shift4 Payments. It processes over $200 billion a year in credit card transactions, about a third of all restaurants, hotels, and casinos in the U.S. Went public in 2020. He ran it as CEO from age 16 until he stepped down to take over NASA last year. He also co-founded Draken International, which ran a fleet of over 100 retired fighter jets whose entire job was playing the enemy in combat training for U.S. Air Force and NATO pilots. He sold it to Blackstone for over $100 million. He has over 8,000 hours in the cockpit and can fly more than a dozen types of military jets. He personally owns a MiG-29, a Russian fighter that tops 1,500 mph, which he bought from the estate of Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen. It's the only one in private American hands. In 2009, he flew around the entire planet in a small Cessna jet in 61 hours and 51 minutes, a world record, to raise money for Make-A-Wish. In 2021, he paid for and commanded Inspiration4, the first all-civilian spaceflight. Four people with no astronaut training, three days orbiting Earth, $250 million raised for St. Jude Children's Research Hospital. Then in 2024, he went back up on Polaris Dawn and floated outside the spacecraft, held to it by a 12-foot cable, in the first spacewalk ever done by someone outside a government space agency. That same flight reached 870 miles above Earth, farther than any human had been since the last Apollo crew in 1972. He took over as NASA's 15th administrator in December 2025. In his first three months, he redirected $20 billion away from a planned space station around the moon and toward building a permanent base on the moon's surface. Right now he's aboard the USS John P. Murtha, about 50 miles off San Diego. The capsule carrying the Artemis II crew is going to hit the atmosphere tonight at around 25,000 mph. If the heat shield holds (it took damage on its last unmanned test), if the parachutes open, four astronauts splash down at 8:07 PM ET after a 694,000-mile trip around the moon. And the person waiting for them has been to space twice, walked outside a spacecraft, owns the only Russian fighter jet in private American hands, and started his first company as a teenager in his parents' basement. His call sign is "Rook."

Feels like an appropriate time to revisit this post. So happy to witness history vs reading about it. We’re back to the moon baby! @NASA @NASAArtemis @NASAAdmin

Happy @DaleJr caught the splashdown after missing the launch

Your last flight hit maybe 600 mph. Tonight four astronauts hit Earth's atmosphere at 25,000 mph. Forty times faster. NASA needs them at 17 mph by the time they touch water off San Diego. The engineering behind that slowdown is one of the best stories I've come across. It comes down to one piece of hardware: a 16.5-foot shield bolted to the bottom of the capsule, made of 186 blocks of a heat-absorbing coating called Avcoat on a titanium frame. When the capsule hits atmosphere, those blocks burn away on purpose, carrying heat with them so the crew sits at 75°F inside while the outside hits 5,000°F, roughly half the temperature of the sun's surface. And there is no backup for this system. NASA builds redundancy into everything else on the spacecraft. Not the shield. I have to tell you what happened last time because it makes tonight way more interesting. In 2022, NASA flew this exact shield on an uncrewed test called Artemis I. When the capsule came back, chunks had cracked off in over 100 spots. Way worse than any computer model predicted. Took two years and over 100 lab tests to pin down why. The answer is sort of beautiful in a nerdy way. During that 2022 reentry, the capsule did a "skip," dipping into the atmosphere, bouncing back out into space, then diving in again. The problem was the bounce. When the capsule floated back out, the outside cooled, but the inside of the shield was still scorching. Gases trapped in the coating had nowhere to go because the cooled outer layer sealed shut. Pressure built. Cracks formed. Pieces blew off. Apollo engineers in the 1960s were aware of this exact gas-venting issue. But when NASA remade the coating for Orion decades later, they accidentally made it less breathable. The fix for tonight is my favorite part. They kept the same shield; it was already bolted on, and swapping it would've added 18 months. Instead of changing hardware, engineers changed the flight path. Tonight's capsule does a shorter, shallower bounce, keeping steady heat on the shield so gases can escape properly. Same shield. Different math. One detail from a January safety review gave me real confidence. Engineers modeled total shield failure, coating stripped clean off. The titanium frame underneath could still protect the crew on its own. A physics professor at Northeastern said she'd personally feel safe riding in it because with a system this simple, there are only so many things that can go wrong. By tonight, these four people will have gone 252,756 miles from Earth, farther than any human ever, beating Apollo 13 by over 4,000 miles, at the fastest speed a human has ever moved. And the moment the capsule hits the Pacific, a diver will swim underneath and photograph the shield, giving NASA its first real proof of whether the new math worked.

Behind the four astronauts of Artemis II are hundreds of people tracking their every move: monitoring spacecraft systems, evaluating crew safety, and staying in constant communication. Let’s hear it for the team in Mission Control responsible for getting the astronauts around the Moon and safely home.

I had two of these issues just yesterday 🤣

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I’m irrationally proud of these people. A real life Fantastic Four.

don’t worry guys jesse is gonna catch them!!

We love @NASAAdmin!! @NASA

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And splashdown! America is back in the business of sending astronauts to the Moon and bringing them home safely. Reid, Victor, Christina, and Jeremy did an outstanding job. These talented astronauts inspired the world and represented their space agencies and nations as humanity’s ambassadors to the stars. This was a test mission, the first crewed flight of SLS and Orion, pushing farther into the unforgiving environment of space than ever before, and it carried real risk. They accepted that risk for all we stood to learn and for the exciting missions that follow, as we return to the lunar surface, build a Moon base, and prepare for what comes next. And they were not alone. The entire NASA workforce, our commercial and international partners, and the hopes and dreams of people all over the world were with them. The astronauts know it, and you should too. This mission would not have been possible without you. Congratulations. Artemis II, mission accomplished.

.@NASA socials have handled the Artemis II mission well! From a Spotify list with the crew wake-up songs to the many media events while in lunar orbit, just so good. *Chef kiss*

Anyone else hold their breath for the parachutes? #ArtemisII

This might be the year that we see kids dressing up as astronauts for Halloween again…. Nature is healing

LIVE: They are coming home. Watch as the Artemis II crew returns to Earth, splashing down at around 8:07pm ET (0007 UTC April 11). twitter.com/i/broadcasts/1…

They're halfway home. The Artemis II astronauts have hit the "halfway" mark between the Moon and the Earth. They will splash down in the Pacific Ocean around 8:07 pm ET on Friday, April 10 (0007 UTC on Saturday, April 11), off the coast of San Diego.

Rise and shine, space fans! The official Artemis II wake‑up song playlist is here: open.spotify.com/user/nasaspoti… Stay tuned to find out the crew’s picks for the rest of the mission.