The Artemis era truly kicked off Friday evening when a gleaming spacecraft that had journeyed 700,000 miles around the Moon, carrying four astronauts, splashed down in the Pacific Ocean off California.

For NASA, its international partners, and humanity as a whole, the successful completion of Artemis II signaled our species’ return to deep space after more than half a century.

It was a remarkable achievement, and NASA deserves credit for making an extraordinarily difficult task look comparatively straightforward. Yet it also raises a key question: what comes next?

NASA recently adjusted its plans for Artemis III and IV to insert a stepping-stone mission before attempting a crewed lunar landing. Considerable additional work is required to make those flights happen. To be blunt, the Artemis II mission that ended Friday was the lowest-hanging fruit of the Artemis program.

“The work ahead is greater than the work behind us,” said Amit Kshatriya, NASA’s associate administrator, after Friday night’s landing.

The next phase calls for more complex operations, involving multiple vehicles and ultimately a descent to another celestial body. To meet its objectives, NASA will need to remove the training wheels. Below is the status of the major elements that must come together to land humans on the Moon.

Space Launch System

Several NASA officials praised the Space Launch System’s performance during the April 1 Artemis II launch, saying it hit the mission’s target orbit with better than 99 percent accuracy.

The core stage for Artemis III is expected to depart the Michoud, Louisiana factory later this month for delivery to Kennedy Space Center in Florida. Other rocket components have already arrived or will do so soon.

Meanwhile, the Mobile Launch Tower sustained moderate damage and will be returned to the Vehicle Assembly Building in Florida for refurbishment and subsequent stacking operations for the next mission.

Plunging through the atmosphere at over 30 times the speed of sound, NASA’s Orion spacecraft streaked over the Pacific on Friday, bringing four astronauts back and successfully concluding humanity’s first Moon mission in almost 54 years.

Surface temperatures rose to roughly 5,000 degrees Fahrenheit as a shell of plasma surrounded the Orion spacecraft, named Integrity, and its four far-traveling crew, briefly disrupting radio contact between the lunar craft and Mission Control in Houston. Heading from southwest to northeast, the vehicle aimed for a splashdown area southwest of San Diego, where a US Navy recovery vessel waited for the crew’s return. After a six-minute communications blackout, ground teams reestablished contact with Orion commander Reid Wiseman.

Airborne tracking aircraft relayed live footage of Orion’s return to Mission Control, capturing the capsule shedding its parachute cover and releasing a sequence of canopies to steady its drop toward the Pacific. Finally, three primary main chutes — each about 10,500 square feet — inflated to slow Orion for splashdown at 8:07 pm EDT Friday (00:07 UTC Saturday).

Over the course of 14 minutes, Orion shed nearly 25,000 mph of speed, exposing the crew in their seats to two short bursts of roughly 3.9 Gs.

The USS John P. Murtha, an amphibious transport dock, sent helicopters and small craft to recover Wiseman and his Artemis II crewmates — Victor Glover, Christina Koch and Jeremy Hansen. Wiseman radioed that there were “four green crew members” inside Orion’s cockpit, signaling they were healthy and in good spirits following splashdown.

Koch was the first to leave the capsule, climbing onto an inflatable raft — the so-called “front porch” — alongside Navy divers gathered beside the spacecraft. Glover followed, and then Hansen, the Canadian astronaut, stepped onto the front porch. Wiseman, the ship’s commander, was the last to unbuckle and join the recovery team. Two helicopters were scheduled to lift the astronauts from the water and carry them to the John P. Murtha, where medical teams would check them before they were flown to San Diego and then back to Houston to reunite with their families on Saturday.

A group of Californians filed suit this week against Sutter Health and MemorialCare, alleging an AI transcription tool recorded them without permission, in breach of state and federal law.

The proposed class-action complaint, submitted Wednesday in federal court in San Francisco, says that within the last six months the plaintiffs obtained medical treatment at various Sutter and MemorialCare facilities.

During those visits, clinicians employed Abridge AI. According to the complaint, this system “collected and processed their private physician–patient conversations. Plaintiffs did not receive clear notice that their medical discussions would be recorded by an artificial intelligence platform, transmitted beyond the clinical environment, or handled by third-party systems.”

The complaint further alleges those recordings “contained personally identifiable medical information, including, but not limited to, medical histories, symptoms, diagnoses, medications, treatment discussions, and other sensitive health disclosures made during confidential medical consultations.”

In recent years, Abridge’s software and AI tools have been rapidly rolled out across major health care providers nationwide, including Kaiser Permanente, the Mayo Clinic, Duke Health, and many others.

Two distinct arms seem to begin from roughly the same spot at the crust-mantle boundary. One arm angles northeastward toward the Yellowstone caldera, while the other extends toward the Snake River Plain. The split between them produces the volcano-free zone lying between those two features.

The researchers concluded that, regardless of other factors supplying molten material, the routes to the surface were likely controlled by stresses in the crust. Those stresses depend on both the crust’s existing structures (mapped largely via seismic data) and broader processes occurring in the underlying mantle. Consequently, the model incorporated basic geological details, established physical processes, and some historical context about how that section of crust developed.

This brings the Farallon plate back into the picture. Its remnants, pushed beneath the North American plate, continue to sink and move through the mantle. The researchers infer that this motion drives a general eastward flow of material through the viscous mantle. Just east of Yellowstone, however, that flow encounters the older margin of the North American plate, where the crust is thicker and denser than the portion of the continent laid down by the Farallon plate.

New pathways

That thicker crust forces the mantle flow to bend downward. The change in flow generates a range of stresses in the crust, most notably compression between the older and newer sections of the North American plate and a downward drag on the older block. Local stresses are further increased because the material that erupted to form the Snake River Plain is denser than much of the surrounding rock, producing strain on nearby rocks as it attempts to sink.