The four astronauts aboard NASA’s Artemis II mission splashed down safely after completing the first crewed lunar flyby since Apollo 17 in 1972. The crew became the first humans to see parts of the moon’s far side with the naked eye — a small but genuinely historic distinction in a mission that, from the outside, can seem like a very expensive test of existing hardware.

It is, to some extent, exactly that. Artemis II was never going to land on the moon. Its job was to prove the systems — Orion, SLS, the life support, the reentry profile — work with people inside. By that measure it appears to have succeeded. What comes next is Artemis III, which is supposed to put boots on the lunar surface. The pressure on that mission, whenever it launches, will be considerable. For now, four people who went to the moon and came back are home.

The Artemis II crew — Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, Christina Koch, and Jeremy Hansen — are on their way home after becoming the first humans to fly around the Moon since Apollo 17 in 1972.

They’re the first humans to see parts of the lunar far side with the naked eye. That’s worth stopping to appreciate.

The mission was a crewed flyby — no landing — but the point was to prove the Orion spacecraft and Space Launch System could carry humans to lunar distance and back. By all accounts, it did.

The Artemis II crew is returning to Earth after completing humanity’s first crewed journey to the vicinity of the Moon since 1972. The mission sent four astronauts on a lunar flyby — no landing, but a free-return trajectory that took them closer to the Moon than any human has been in over fifty years.

The crew has been reflecting publicly on the experience. The descriptions follow a familiar pattern from Apollo-era astronauts: the scale of the Moon at close range, the sight of Earth as a small object in a very large emptiness, the particular silence of deep space. There is a reason people keep describing it the same way. It tends to affect people similarly.