How the Navy Is Relearning the Art of Pulling Astronauts Out of the Ocean
When the Orion spacecraft, named Integrity by its crew, punches through the atmosphere Friday evening at nearly 25,000 miles per hour, the four astronauts inside will have traveled a quarter of a million miles from Earth. They’ve already broken the distance record held since Apollo 13, photographed the far side of the Moon, and witnessed a 54-minute solar eclipse no human being has ever seen before.
In the final minutes, the mission will come down to a helicopter squadron, a team of Navy divers, and a 660-foot amphibious transport dock ship waiting in the Pacific swells off San Diego.
The USS John P. Murtha (LPD-26) departed Naval Base San Diego earlier this week, carrying roughly 150 NASA personnel and a couple hundred sailors under the Coronado Bridge and out to open water. The ship’s assignment is to serve as the primary recovery platform for the first crewed lunar mission in more than half a century. It is, on paper, a straightforward retrieval job. In practice, it’s a carefully choreographed operation that NASA and the Navy have spent over a decade rebuilding almost from scratch.
Between 1961 and 1975, the U.S. Navy recovered 30 crewed spacecraft from American waters during the Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo programs. Everything from destroyers to full aircraft carriers was pressed into service. The USS Hornet plucked Apollo 11’s command module from the Pacific. The USS Ticonderoga recovered Apollo 17, the last crewed Moon mission, in December 1972. After Apollo-Soyuz splashed down in July 1975 and the Navy’s USS New Orleans hauled in the capsule, that was it. The Navy didn’t perform another crewed spacecraft recovery for 45 years.
The Space Shuttle landed on a runway. The Soyuz touched down on the Kazakh steppe. For nearly five decades, the institutional knowledge of open-ocean capsule recovery (including the divers, the protocols, and the choreography of small boats and helicopters converging on a bobbing spacecraft) atrophied and were forgotten on an institutional level.
NASA began rebuilding that capability in the mid-2010s with a series of exercises called Underway Recovery Tests, or URTs. There have been twelve of them. Each iteration added complexity: first recovering an empty test article, then adding role-players simulating crew egress, then rehearsing medical triage, then introducing weather contingencies. URT-11, in early 2024, put all four Artemis II astronauts through the process aboard a capsule mockup. URT-12, in March 2025, ran the full sequence aboard the USS Somerset.
Captain Neil Krueger, speaking from Naval Base San Diego this week, said that the timeline can be summarized as twelve years of preparation for what amounts to a two-hour window between splashdown and having the crew safely aboard the ship.
One of the most telling differences between the Apollo and Artemis recovery architectures is the ship itself. During the Apollo program, aircraft carriers were the platform of choice. Apollo 11’s recovery alone involved eight SH-3 Sea King helicopters operating from the Hornet, each configured with specialized equipment down to the troop seat covers and biological isolation garments the astronauts would wear to quarantine.
NASA chose a different path for Artemis. Instead of aircraft carriers, the agency selected San Antonio-class Landing Platform Dock ships. These 660-foot vessels were originally designed to deliver Marines to contested shorelines, but their centerpiece feature is a 390-by-50-foot well deck that can be flooded with seawater. That well deck allows the recovery team to tow the Orion capsule directly into the ship’s interior without craning it out of the water. That’s a significant improvement over the Apollo approach, which required helicopters to hoist capsules onto carrier flight decks.
The Murtha also brings a helicopter pad, onboard medical facilities, communications infrastructure, and the ability to launch and recover small boats. MH-60S Sea Hawk helicopters from Helicopter Sea Combat Squadron 23, the “Wildcards,” based at Naval Air Station North Island, will track the capsule through reentry, recover the astronauts via hoist once they exit Orion, and ferry them to the ship for medical evaluation. Navy divers from Explosive Ordnance Disposal Group 1 will handle the capsule itself.
The sequence is tightly scripted. Recovery assets are in the water two hours before splashdown, and helicopters go airborne one hour out. In the final eight minutes, as Orion descends under its parachutes, two helicopters with specialized imaging equipment track the capsule’s descent and relay its position. By the time the spacecraft hits the water at roughly 20 miles per hour, the entire formation is converging. NASA expects the crew to be aboard the Murtha within two hours of splashdown.
What makes this recovery more than a logistics exercise is its explicit role as a training run for future operations. NASA’s own mission objectives document lists the validation of post-splashdown crew rescue operations as a formal Artemis II objective/deliverable.
The recovery architecture for Artemis II will serve as the template for Artemis III and beyond, missions that will involve astronauts returning not just from lunar flyby but from the surface of the Moon. NASA is targeting early 2028 for the first Artemis lunar landing. Those crews will come back to Earth having spent days on the lunar surface in reduced gravity, potentially more physically compromised than the Artemis II crew, and the recovery team will need to extract them efficiently and get them into medical evaluation fast.
After the astronauts are cleared by medical teams, they’re scheduled to complete post-landing functional tests, including an obstacle course and a simulated spacewalk, designed to measure how quickly they readapt to Earth's gravity. That data feeds directly into planning for surface missions, where crew physical performance immediately after return could be a limiting factor for mission design.
The weather criteria illustrate how carefully this is being managed: no rain or thunderstorms within 30 nautical miles of the recovery site, winds below 25 knots, and wave heights under six feet. If conditions don’t cooperate, the splashdown location shifts. The ocean, as one analyst noted, is not obligated to respect NASA’s timeline.
During Apollo, recovery was a known quantity. The Navy had been pulling capsules out of the water since the Mercury program, and the institutional muscle memory was fresh. Today, NASA is simultaneously flying a lunar mission and stress-testing a recovery capability that didn’t exist a decade ago.
The demands on that capability are only going to increase. As Artemis missions grow more complex, the recovery operation will become even more of a critical bottleneck. Every element has to work in concert.
There’s also a broader question of scalability. Right now, NASA is using Navy amphibious ships on an as-available basis. But if the Artemis cadence accelerates as planned, and if commercial lunar missions eventually enter the picture, the demand for open-ocean crew recovery could outstrip the Navy’s ability to support it alongside its primary mission set. That may push the next generation of recovery operations toward purpose-built civilian platforms, or toward landing architectures that bypass ocean recovery entirely.
For now, though, the USS John P. Murtha is on station, the Wildcards are ready to fly, and the divers from EOD Group 1 are waiting. On Friday evening, if the Pacific cooperates, they’ll do something the Navy hasn’t done with a lunar crew since 1972. How it plays out will determine how America brings its astronauts home for the next fifty years.
Celebrate the Mission with Us
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Check out our whole collection of Artemis II merchandise at The Space Store and stay tuned for more updates as NASA works toward that March launch window. History is just around the corner.
-Written by Matt Herr