In an excerpt from a new book, Canadian astronaut Jeremy Hansen describes the fiery splashdown that ended NASA's Artemis II mission, Live Science reported. After nine days in space, the four-person crew looked out the Orion capsule window on April 10, 2026, and saw Earth below them. They had travelled more than 250,000 miles (400,000 kilometers) — farther from Earth than any humans had ever gone. The last milestone was a plunge into the Pacific that closed humanity's first crewed mission to the moon in more than 50 years. The account is from "Earthrise: Inside Artemis II, the Groundbreaking Human Mission into Deep Space," which Hansen co-wrote with John Larsen. Hansen, a mission specialist with the Canadian Space Agency and the only non-American on the crew, was on his first flight, dropping through the sky at 24,600 mph (39,600 km/h).
He writes that he had reason to trust the capsule, but this was also his first time in space. He was not, he says, afraid for himself so much as aware of the people waiting for him. Immediately after the European Service Module was jettisoned, and exactly half an hour before splashdown, Mission Control began a 19-second "crew module raise burn," the first and only burn using the capsule's small thrusters for that purpose. The thrusters then fired almost constantly to stabilize the spacecraft: "loud thuds, as if Thor himself were hammering on our spacecraft," as G-forces built and scrubbed off the speed the rocket had added nine days earlier. "It had already been a wild ride," he writes, "but I also knew another crazy part — parachute deployment and the actual splashdown — lay ahead."
Commander Reid Wiseman replied to Mission Control, "Houston, Integrity, we have you loud and clear," using the spacecraft's name. "Integrity, we see three good-looking parachutes," the capsule communicator said. Within seconds, splashdown speed had fallen to 27 kilometers per hour. Hansen writes that mission specialist Christina Koch seemed to agree, and that they grabbed one another's hands in a moment of celebration. The excerpt, as published by Live Science, is Hansen's first-person account of that final descent, not a new NASA accident investigation or a change to the mission's already completed outcome.
The verified publication is a crew memoir of a splashdown that happened in April, now being issued in book form. It adds Hansen's in-capsule detail — the raise burn, the hammering thrusters, the three parachutes, the handshake with Koch — to the public record of a flight that had already made history as the first crewed lunar mission in more than half a century.