Welcome home! Artemis 2's Orion capsule returns to Florida after epic moon mission (photo)

NASA's Orion spacecraft for the agency’s Artemis 2 mission arrives at the Kennedy Space Center Multi Payload Processing Facility in Florida on Tuesday, April 28, 2026. (Image credit: NASA/Tiffany Fairley) Artemis 2's Orion capsule has returned to its Florida launch site.The spacecraft, named "Integrity," arrived at NASA's Kennedy Space Center (KSC) on Tuesday (April 28), four weeks after launching from the facility's Pad 39B.De-servicing "includes removing payloads from the crew module, removing avionics boxes for reuse, and retrieving data on the spacecraft to better understand how it performed to inform procedures and plans for future Artemis missions," NASA officials said in an April 28 statement."Orion's heat shield and other elements will be removed for extensive analysis, and remaining hazards such as excess propellant will be offloaded," they added.Artemis 2 launched atop a Space Launch System (SLS) rocket on April 1, sending four astronauts — NASA's Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover and Christina Koch, and the Canadian Space Agency's Jeremy Hansen — toward the moon aboard Integrity.The quartet flew around the moon's far side on April 6, getting farther from Earth than any humans ever had. Integrity splashed down off the coast of San Diego on April 10, wrapping up the first