Artemis crew home safely after completing historic mission to the Moon

In the previous, uncrewed test flight of the Artemis system in 2022, the Orion Capsule's shield suffered unexpected damage which raised questions about how hot the interior might get on a crewed mission, even though temperatures on Artemis I stayed within safe limits.Engineers responded by changing the way the spacecraft re‑enters the atmosphere that simulations showed would reduce the thermal load on the shield. This mission was the first time that new return path has been tried in flight.We'll have to wait for the full data to see how much the heating was reduced, but whatever the engineers decided clearly did its job of bringing the crew safely home.Speaking at the press conference, Nasa associate administrator Anit Kshatriya contrasted the precision of that angle with the 250,000-mile journey to the Moon."The team hit it, that is not luck, it is 1,000 people doing their jobs," he said. The Artemis programme aims to step up Moon exploration, land humans on the Moon for the first time since 1972, set up a permanent lunar base and aim for a crewed mission to Mars.The next flight, Artemis III, has been redesigned under Nasa's new administrator Jared Isaacman to be an Earth-orbital mission to test rendezvous and docking with the SpaceX and Blue Origin lunar landers, and is pencilled in for mid-2027.