From the recovery of Skylab space station astronauts in the 1970s to the retrieval of the unmanned Artemis I space capsule in December 2022, the Navy has a history of participating in space missions.
On Wednesday, Feb. 28, the NASA-led Artemis II team hosted a press conference at Naval Base San Diego, where they discussed the Underway Recovery Test 11 that occurred from Feb. 21-28, in preparation for the Artemis II’s launch to the moon, set for September 2025.
The base serves as the hub for the recovery team tasked with retrieving the crew from the Pacific Ocean upon their return to Earth.
A part of the Navy recovery team is Helicopter Sea Combat Squadron-23, which is based at Naval Air Station North Island.
“They’re the ones who are responsible for getting the astronauts and then bringing them back [to the ship] for medical examination,” said Chloe Morgan, a public affairs officer for the U.S. Navy Expeditionary Strike Group 3.
The Artemis program is named for the mythical Greek goddess of the moon. It not only aims to establish extensive scientific lunar exploration; NASA is set to land the first person of color, the first woman and its first international partner astronaut on the moon, while simultaneously preparing for human expeditions to Mars.
The American crew members selected for the mission include pilot Victor Glover, mission specialist Christina Koch and commander Reid Wiseman, alongside mission specialist Jeremy Hansen from the Canadian Space Agency.
“This Artemis mission campaign is not just about going back to the moon and going back … it’s about building on what we learn there and exploring even deeper,” Koch said. “That means going to Mars and answering some of those fundamental questions that we all have about ourselves. What does it mean to be human? Are we alone in the universe? How do we all get here?”
The Artemis II team unveiled the new test version of the Orion spacecraft, which will be their home for the anticipated 10-day mission that will exceed 620,000 miles.
Recovery test details
On Feb. 22, members of NASA’s Landing and Recovery team worked to secure and retrieve a test module of the Orion spacecraft during training exercises. The drill was the eleventh in a series of Artemis recovery tests, and the first time NASA and its partners, the Department of Defense and Navy, put their procedures to the test with the astronauts.
Liliana Villarreal, the Artemis II landing and recovery director in Exploration Ground Systems (EGS) at NASA, said the eight-day recovery test included teaching sailors how to handle the capsule, releasing it into the Pacific with the stand-in astronauts and running through a simulation of procedures from splashdown, which included having Navy divers retrieve the stand-in astronauts.
For the last three days, the four Artemis crew members tested out the capsule.
“The biggest days for us were day five and day seven,” Villarreal said. “The full end-to-end test that we did with the Artemis crew. Day five was all in the daylight and day seven was all at night.”
It will take the team three days to get to the moon from their launch from the SLS (Space Launch System) rocket at the Kennedy Space Center on Merritt Island, Florida, according to Madison Tuttle, a public affairs specialist for NASA.
“They’ll lift off, and then do a really, really high orbit around the moon,” Tuttle said. “It’s actually the highest elliptical orbit anyone’s ever done. Throughout the first couple days of the mission is actually getting, you know, close to the moon, then they’re gonna do that elliptical orbit around. We’ll do one more. And then that’s when they come back to Earth.”
Upon re-entry on Earth, the spacecraft will slow from 25,000 mph to 300 mph before parachuting into the ocean, approximately 60 miles south of San Diego, where a Navy recovery team will be on standby for their retrieval.
According to Morgan, the planned landing area for the Artemis II was set so the retrieving naval ship — one of the Navy’s amphibious ships — will not be hit by space debris but close enough to recover the astronauts quickly.
Villarreal said the amphibious ships (also known as landing platform docks) provide what the Artemis team needs to conduct the mission.
“We need a vessel to be able to handle the vehicle, have medical care — just in case something happens, we can plan anywhere from San Diego to 1200 nautical miles — and the last thing is we need the helicopter capability, and we have to do that in two hours [after the capsule lands],” Villarreal said.
The two-hour window is crucial because the battery of the capsule will last around that long once it lands.
“We have to wait for the capsule to actually do its shut down sequence while the capsule is powered up,” Villarreal said. “It’s actually emitting ammonia and ammonia is really bad for humans, so we have to wait until the capsule does its main bus power down.”
After the capsule powers down, the Artemis crew will do a hazard assessment before Navy divers can open the Orion’s hatch door. Villarreal said a medical Navy doctor will then enter the capsule to assess the crew.
Upon being extracted from the spacecraft, the astronauts will be airlifted by helicopter to the recovery ship for routine medical examinations before their return to shore.
NASA invited the recovery team to go to the Kennedy Space Center’s Neutral Buoyancy Lab to train Navy divers on recovering the space capsule. The divers will recover the space debris and the Orion capsule for the Navy to bring to the Kennedy Space Station to perform diagnostics.
“We’re looking at actually flying it back,” Villarreal said.
The Department of Defense team will inform the Artemis team which ship will be used to pick up the spacecraft upon its arrival.
“We will know six months beforehand what ship it will be,” Morgan said.
Areas of Improvement for Artemis
Commander Wiseman said that Commanding Officer of the USS San Diego David Walton gave the recovery teams a reset day after technical issues.
“The first time we went out [to the capsule], we were in rougher seas than we had expected,” he added.
Morgan said preliminary rehearsals for Underway Recovery Test 11 were being conducted on Feb. 14, a day when motorists driving over the Coronado Bay Bridge may have noticed helicopters “playing in the water, retrieving our stand-in astronauts.”
Tuttle said at least one more recovery test will be held for Artemis II before its launch and that the Artemis team comes out to Naval Base San Diego between recovery tests.
Artemis II’s original launch date from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida was set for late 2024. However, NASA announced a delay on Jan. 9, pushing the mission until at least September 2025. This delay, according to NASA, is necessary to address technical challenges and ensure the mission’s success.
“The launch date is one of the main drivers for landing,” Tuttle said. “Right now, the predicted launch date is September 2025, and that’s really to make sure that the rocket is stacked and ready to go, [and] the crew’s trained up. [The space capsule] is good to splashdown at any time of year. If we have bad weather at our normal landing site, which is about 60 miles off the coast, we have backup locations throughout the Pacific. For Artemis I, we actually did have to go about 300 miles away because the weather was bad off of San Diego.”
Subsequent mission Artemis III — which plans to land the first astronauts by the lunar south pole and humanity’s first return to the moon in more than 50 years — was rescheduled to September 2026. Meanwhile, Artemis IV, the inaugural mission to the Gateway lunar space station, remains scheduled to launch in 2028.
“So even [when] Artemis II happens, and then we’re waiting for Artemis III, we’re going to keep on doing rehearsals,” Morgan said.
