It seems that the 10-day Artemis II lunar flyby mission was just too doggone long for Christina Koch’s pup, Sadie.

For Toledo native Thomas Hughes, the splashdown brought back memories of his own role in space history. Hughes helped recover Apollo 16 as a young Navy sailor 54 years ago this month.

The first astronauts to visit the moon in more than a half-century are home. Artemis II’s crew of four emerged from their lunar capsule after a splashdown in the Pacific on Friday evening and were flown by helicopter to the Navy’s recovery ship.

The Artemis II mission is expected to splash down off the coast of California on Friday night around 8:00 p.m., after successfully orbiting the Moon and breaking the record for the furthest from Earth humans have ever gone (their orbit was higher up than past moon missions,

This week, we got a different moon—the Artemis moon. The moon captured by America’s first mission there in generations is not the moon I look for every time I step outside. It is not the moon I grew up with or the one my parents learned about during the Apollo missions.

For NASA astronaut Christina Koch, the journey of nearly 700,000 miles around the moon ended with a welcome that was decidedly down to earth.

NASA and its contractors are in a sprint to prepare rockets, spacecraft and suits to land astronauts on the moon in 2028.

Look up at a full moon on a clear night and you are staring at a face that has been punched, gouged, and battered for 4 billion years. Those dark patches are vast basins blasted open by impacts so colossal they reshaped a world.