How To Recover a Spacecraft

At the end of the Artemis II mission around the Moon, the Orion spacecraft and its crew splashed down in the Pacific Ocean, where a joint NASA and U.S. Navy team was ready to recover both the astronauts and the capsule. After splashdown, the recovery team secured Orion, opened the side hatch, and assisted the crew out of the spacecraft. The astronauts were then airlifted by helicopter to the Navy recovery ship, and Orion was brought into the ship’s well deck for transport back to shore. It was a complex operation that ensured the safe return of both the crew and the capsule after their historic mission. This is how to recover a spacecraft. Credit: NASA Writer: Erika Peters Editor: Phil Sexton Producers: Rad Sinyak, Erika Peters Join NASA as we go forward to the Moon and on to Mars -- discover the latest on Earth, the Solar System and beyond with a weekly update in your inbox. Subscribe at: https://www.nasa.gov/subscribe

What is said in the film

I am Lili Villarreal. I am the Artemis landing recovery director. And this is how you recover a spacecraft. We are here in the well deck of the USS Somerset, where we did simulations of an actual splashdown and what it would take to get the crew out of the capsule and also recover the vehicle. Behind me is the crew module test article.

You can actually put people in it. It is actually a vessel. It has all the instrumentation structures that Orion would have. The DoD, Department of Defense is a very large part of our operations. We have two helicopters dedicated for imagery, and we have two helicopters dedicated for the capsule.

We have a whole entire Navy diver team, and those are the guys out in the open water. We do bring some NBL experts that also go in the open water with them, and they're really the guys who will be the first people who open the hatch and then eventually get the crew out. I'm Tim Goddard. I am the EGS open water lead for the Orion and Artemis missions. We are at the Neutral Buoyancy Laboratory.

It's an offsite campus of the Johnson Space Center. We are training the Navy divers and helicopter rescue. Why we bring them to the NBL is for the very specific and technical nature of how you operate in and around a space capsule. We teach them the specific techniques they're required to do to keep both themselves safe, the flight crew safe, as well as the capsule. This is where we start, and then we'll push off to San Diego and we do what we call just in time training.

By the time they do the actual real mission, they have hours and hours on each phase of that recovery. Objective for today is DoD training. So today we're going to be training our divers and our aircrews. Almost every underway recovery we first start, our first day is always what we call in and outs. And that is really to train the ship on how to handle the CMTA.

We fill up this entire well deck with 7. 5ft of water, and then we do in and outs familiarization runs to train the actual military crew that will be on the ship. We then deploy the CMTA out in the open ocean. We do whatever exercise training exercises that we want to do. We actually like to simulate what it would be from splashdown.

All the way to recovering the crew back to the flight deck. And then we go into contingency simulations. We actually pretended that we had a hurt crew member, and then how would we deal with that from a medical perspective? The next thing we do is an iteration of recovering the capsule. We’ve gotten really good at recovering the capsule.

We've been doing that for multiple URTs. We did it for Artemis I. The next day. We did a full mission profile, and that is an entire exercise simulating the actual recovery. We have all four of our helicopters in play.

We have the entire crew suited up in play. And then we go through the checklist with splashdown. My name is HMC Reuben Hickox, I am a deep sea diving medical technician in the US Navy. Recovery training that we've been doing, a lot of it has been getting transporting the astronauts safely from the capsule after they land, to the ship, as well as, utilizing the ship to recover the actual capsule. We have a couple inflatable rafts that we use.

One is the stability collar, which is just an inflatable ring that goes around it, and then front porch, which is an inflatable life raft used to attach to the capsule. And once the front porch is stable and we can walk on it, that's when we'll start one by one, just taking the astronauts out of the capsule. The search and rescue med techs will hook up with the astronauts, and they'll bring them up to a helicopter, fly them to the Somerset. And as soon as they down, they get medical professionals all over transporting them into the medical bay, making sure that they're good to go. This is a dream come true.

I think everybody that works for NASA says the exact same thing, because it's such a big teamwork type of operation and very complex, and I just thrive and love on those kind of scenarios. It's long days, long hours, a lot of responsibility. But at the end we all really enjoy it. We are Artemis. I cannot wait to see it come back from the Moon.

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