The Orion capsule carrying the Artemis II astronauts has successfully splashed down off the coast of San Diego at 8:07PM Eastern time on April 10. It signals the conclusion of Artemis II’s 10-day journey around the moon, which is meant to be a test flight for a future mission that would bring humanity back to the lunar surface. The Orion crew module carrying the mission’s astronauts separated from the service module at 7:33 PM. While the service module was designed to burn up in the Earth’s atmosphere, the crew capsule was built to bring the astronauts back home safely. By 7:53 PM, Orion reached our planet’s upper atmosphere, where a six-minute communication blackout occurred due to the capsule heating up as it started its guided descent. The capsule has 11 parachutes, with its drogue parachutes being deployed at 23,400 feet to stabilize and slow it down. When Orion reached 5,400 feet above the ground, the drogue parachutes were cut off so that the three main parachutes could be deployed. That decreased the capsule’s velocity to 200 feet per second, enabling a safe splashdown. NASA’s engineers conducted several tests while the capsule was in the water before the recovery team headed to the capsule on inflatable boats to extract the crew from Orion. By 9:34 PM, all four crew members were out of the capsule. They were then hoisted into helicopters and flown to the USS John P. Murtha dock ship, where doctors will assess their health. Artemis II launched on April 1 with four astronauts on board: NASA’s Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover and Christina Koch, as well as Canadian Space Agency’s Jeremy Hansen. They traveled around the moon for almost 10 days, reaching distances no other crewed mission has before it. The astronauts took photos of the far side of the moon , the side we don’t see from our planet, including amazing closeups of the lunar surface using their smartphones. That makes them the first humans to directly and personally view the lunar far side. During NASA’s post-splashdown news conference, the agency said it will announce the Artemis III crew soon. Artemis III will rendezvous with one or both commercial landers being developed by SpaceX and Blue Origin in low Earth orbit, which will take humans to the lunar surface. It will test the lander’s ability to dock with Orion before NASA lands humans on the moon again. Welcome home Reid, Victor, Christina, and Jeremy! 🫶 The Artemis II astronauts have splashed down at 8:07pm ET (0007 UTC April 11), bringing their historic 10-day mission around the Moon to an end. pic.twitter.com/1yjAgHEOYl — NASA (@NASA) April 11, 2026 This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/science/space/the-artemis-ii-astronauts-are-back-after-a-10-day-journey-around-the-moon-033800654.html?src=rss
Sick! The Federal Aviation Administration is targeting gamers in its most recent job advertisement for air traffic controllers. The administration's annual hiring window opens at 12AM ET on April 17, and considering the ongoing shortage of air traffic controllers, it's calling this a period of "supercharged hiring." Rad! The FAA's YouTube video draws parallels between gaming and directing air traffic, and notes that the average salary for the role after three years is $155,000. Hella! The FAA is clearly seeking players who are at least old enough to remember the Xbox One and Bjergsen in the LCS, which puts would-be candidates around their early 20s at least. It's either that, or the ad editors really just picked videos at random from the pile of stock footage marked gamerz . But I won't lie, it made me smile to see that Xbox One logo appear out of nowhere. Nostalgia is a hell of a thing. "To reach the next generation of air traffic controllers, we need to adapt," US Transportation Secretary Sean P. Duffy said . "This campaign’s innovative communication style and focus on gaming taps into a growing demographic of young adults who have many of the hard skills it takes to be a successful controller." The FAA has been losing more air traffic controllers than it can hire and retain since the 2010s, and this trend only worsened during the pandemic in the 2020s, according to a report released in December by the US Government Accountability Office. The administration increased hiring every year since 2021, but at the end of 2025 it employed 13,164 air traffic controllers, 6 percent fewer than in 2015, the report said. At the same time, the number of flights in the air traffic control system increased by about 10 percent, to 30.8 million. Or, as the FAA put it on the ATC hiring page : "Join the BEST AND BRIGHTEST, the elite squad of 14,000 controllers protecting 2.9 million daily passengers." Applicants must be a US citizen, under 31 (maybe those video editors do know what they're doing), and be able to speak fluent English. An aptitude test, medical screening and academy training follows, among other steps. This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/gaming/the-faa-is-encouraging-gamers-to-get-jobs-in-air-traffic-control-230308014.html?src=rss
