Al Root
The historic 10-day Artemis II mission to the moon and back is almost finished.
Four astronauts, three Americans -- Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, and Christina Koch -- and Canadian Jeremy Hansen, who have traveled farther from Earth than any humans in history, will splash down off the coast of San Diego, California, at about 8:07 p.m. on Friday, April 10.
The spacecraft will hit the Earth's atmosphere at about 24,000 miles per hour and heat up to roughly 5,000 degrees Fahrenheit. Re-entry is risky, and the ship relies on " Avcoat" tiles to manage all the heat. Avcoat is a mix of silica fibers, phenolic microballoons, and epoxy resin that chars and erodes, removing heat away. A type of Avcoat was used on NASA's Apollo missions.
The re-entry event can be watched here.
The astronauts' return will bring to a close an epic trip during which American astronauts left low Earth orbit for the first time since the 1970s.
The Artemis group of missions aims to return Americans to the Moon and establish a permanent presence there.
Artemis I blasted off in 2022, testing NASA's huge space launch systems, or SLS, and the Orion spacecraft, which is carrying the astronauts home. Artemis II lifted off shortly after 6:35 p.m. Eastern time from the Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Fla., on Apr. 1. Artemis III is slated for 2027 and will test Orion and lunar landers built by Elon Musk's SpaceX and Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin. Artemis IV is slated for 2028 and is intended to be the first U.S. moon landing since 1972. Artemis V should go later that year, marking the beginning of moon base construction.
Artemis II was the second flight of the SLS rocket, which has cost tens of billions of dollars to develop. In the time it took to work on SLS, SpaceX essentially perfected its partially reusable Falcon 9 rocket, which has launched roughly 650 times, and dramatically lowered the cost to reach space.
Lower costs have enabled a space economy to grow. And, while SLS can't compete with SpaceX on costs, the Artemis mission seems to have sparked investors' imaginations about what's possible.
Since the launch, coming into Friday trading, shares of space technology companies Rocket Lab, Firefly Aerospace, York Space Systems, Redwire, Planet Labs, and AST SpaceMobile were up an average of 23%, about 19 percentage points ahead of the S&P 500.
That group of six represents the end-to-end space economy, including launch services, parts and satellite supply, and applications including Earth imaging and communications.
The six are valued at roughly $100 billion combined. SpaceX, for its part, is valued at about $1.3 trillion and is planning a record-setting IPO for midyear.
Write to Al Root at allen.root@dowjones.com
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(END) Dow Jones Newswires
April 10, 2026 06:49 ET (10:49 GMT)
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