Video: Orion flight preps

A recovery team stationed in the Pacific Ocean west of Baja California secured NASA’s Orion spacecraft and winched it into the flooded well deck of a U.S. Navy transport ship after the capsule splashed down into the sea to wrap up a successful four-and-a-half hour test flight.

NASA announced Monday that former U.S. Navy fighter pilots Reid Wiseman and Victor Glover, veteran space station astronaut Christina Koch, and rookie Canadian astronaut Jeremy Hansen will crew the Artemis 2 mission to fly around the far side of the moon as soon as late next year, a test flight that could carry the foursome farther from Earth than any humans in history.

Watch NASA’s Orion inflight abort test post-launch news briefing, held at the Kennedy Space Center two hours after the test.