NAVAL BASE SAN DIEGO, Calif. — When NASA’s Orion spacecraft shoots back into Earth’s atmosphere, after a visit around the moon next year, one of the Navy’s warships will race to intercept the module carrying the four-member crew.
That responsibility – if all goes as planned in April 2026 for the 10-day mission – will fall to one of the Navy’s San Antonio-class amphibious warships.
USS Somerset (LPD-25) and its crew over the weekend wrapped up a week-long Underway Recovery Training 12, which was the first where the Navy practiced the recovery effort with four NASA astronauts, several who are backups for the Artemis II crew that will do the moon orbit flight. Four astronauts – including two Navy officers, Capts. Reid Wiseman and Victor J. Glover, Jr. – are training for the Artemis II mission set to launch next April for a 10-day trip that includes one orbit of the moon. The crew includes Canadian astronaut Jeremy Hansen, a Royal Canadian Air Force fighter pilot, and NASA flight engineer Christina Koch.
The Navy, as well as the Marine Corps, has a long history, dating back to 1961, of working with NASA to recover astronauts and spacecraft landing in the ocean after a mission to space. These days, the Navy leans on the San Antonio-class amphibious ship as the PRS, or “prime recovery ship” in that role.
“Somerset is proud to have the opportunity to help carry on that legacy,” Capt. Andrew “Andy” Koy, the ship’s commander, said Monday during a press conference aboard the amphibious ship berthed at the naval base along San Diego Bay. “The inherent capabilities of our amphibious transport dock ships are the perfect combination to ensure that the Artemis capsule and crew are safely recovered following their mission.”
The at-sea training “demonstrated that we are ready today,” Koy said. “Just two weeks ago, we were training at sea with Marines taking on the beach, ensuring that our warship is ready for deployment if our nation calls. This week, we are working alongside NASA astronauts to ensure safety in human spaceflight.”
Sailors from other amphibs embarked Somerset for the recovery training. “Depending on whomever is tasked, they will be ready,” he added, noting that “when this mission does go down, that expertise is waterfront-wide.”
Last year, USS San Diego (LPD-22) joined in URT-11 that simulated a splashdown and at-sea recovery with the Orion test module that NASA uses to train space crews and recovery teams. The mock spacecraft is nearly identical to the actual Orion spacecraft. In 2022, USS Portland (LPD-27) recovered the Artemis I Orion that splashed into the Pacific after its 15-day mission to the moon, its external protective tiles browned and burnt from reentering the atmosphere.
This year’s training with Somerset included Navy Helicopter Sea Combat Squadron 23, Explosive Ordnance Disposal Group 1, Amphibious Construction Battalion 1, Expeditionary Strike Group 3, U.S. Air Force’s 1st Air Force Detachment 3 and U.S. Space Force’s 45th Space Launch Delta Weather Squadron.
Squaring away final procedures
The joint training enabled the NASA, Navy and Defense Department crews to sharpen and finalize procedures to recover the crew and spacecraft, said Liliana Villarreal, NASA’s Artemis II landing and recovery director at Kennedy Space Center in Florida.
“We have a lot more things to do. It’s my job to make sure my team stays proficient and our job is to train the next ship to be ready,” Villarreal said.
Approaching the launch date, she said, “whatever ship is tasked, we’re going to do what we call a just-in-time exercise” to prepare the receiving ship’s crew and recovery team for splashdown in the Pacific, somewhere west of San Diego.
Once Artemis II launches for the 10-day mission, “there’s no stopping it, there’s no delaying it,” Villarreal said. “We don’t know what the weather’s going to be like when we come back. This is why this ship, this is why the Navy, is so important. I don’t have the luxury to stay docked at the [international] space station and wait for good weather.”
The exact splashdown site in the Pacific may depend on weather conditions. The 684-foot amphibious transport dock ships have the particular capabilities needed for such a mission, she said. The ship, with a crew of 386 sailors and Marines, has a flight deck that supports large rotary aircraft including MV-22 Osprey tiltrotors, CH-53E Super Stallion transport helicopters and Navy MH-60 Seahawk helicopters that would pluck the NASA crew from the sea. The ship’s large well deck, when flooded, can launch Navy landing craft and Marine Corps amphibious vehicles and enable Navy boat crews to rope-tow Orion back to the ship.
The ship, with room for a landing force of 650 Marines, has a large medical department with an operating room, intensive care unit, laboratory and blood bank and, with an embarked fleet surgical team, can treat and care for casualties. For the Artemis recovery, NASA and Canadian Space Agency flight surgeons and medical specialists would augment the crew.
“I need a hospital, I need helicopters, I need a well deck and I need that global reach of a fast ship. This is it. This is the best ship that we can do to meet our requirements,” Villarreal said.
As the spacecraft falls back to Earth, the U.S. Space Command-led joint effort with NASA will track its progress and trajectory to pinpoint a general splashdown location.
The vast expanse of the Pacific provides almost unlimited space for recovery. With cruising speeds in excess of 24 mph, an LPD ship can close the distance gap and adjust, as needed, to home in near where Orion is likely to splash down. Ideally, the ship would be within a two-hour window to reach the crew module, officials said, but the goal is to shorten that time to get the four crew out of the cramped spacecraft.
After it launches from Kennedy Space Center in Florida, Artemis II is “going to fly 600,000 miles around the moon and back to Earth,” said Stan Love, a veteran NASA astronaut who will serve as the lead CAPCOM or spacecraft communicator for the Artemis II mission.
On day 10, the Orion capsule “will enter the atmosphere about 35 times the speed of sound, and splash down in mid-ocean just a few miles offshore here,” Love said during the press conference. The crew isn’t yet safe. “We won’t say safely back on Earth. We’re in a very tiny capsule. It has no propulsion, and we need to get them and their vehicle safely onboard the ship,” he said. “That is a difficult task.”
“The first priority is going to be getting the astronauts back to be seen by medical just to be recovered,” said Lt Cmdr. Chloe Morgan, an Expeditionary Strike Group 3 spokeswoman. “The second priority is recovering the capsule and all the debris.”
Navy divers will be the first to approach the capsule and ensure the area is safe. They’ll inflate a collar around Orion to help steady it and a floating “porch” where the Navy medical officer and hospital corpsmen can do quick health checks of the crew. Two Navy helicopters will drop collars to hoist the astronauts into the aircraft for the flight to the ship, which HSC-23 crews did in just five minutes last week, Villarreal said. Then, using inflatable combat raiding craft, the NASA and Navy crews will tow Orion to the ship’s well deck for the return to San Diego.
Building muscle memory
Inside the cramped training module last week, NASA Astronaut Andre Douglas was floating at sea, strapped in a metal seat on his back for 90 minutes and reviewing procedures and hand placements.
“I was very comfortable being in the seas. It felt like I was taking a nap on a small boat and I was just hanging out,” Douglas after the press conference.
The former Coast Guard officer and ship driver was selected last year as a backup to the Artemis II crew.
“Nobody felt seasick. We were surprised, because it was rocking,” he said, estimating sea state 2 or 3 at the time. “We had some rogue swells. So, it was like, we get some crazy ones in there, but it was pretty good.”
NASA crews train in sea-like conditions at the Neutral Buoyancy Lab, a large pool facility at Johnson Space Center in Texas. But the at-sea training helped with familiarity and furthered his own experience for what he may have to do if called for the mission. The mock up was a good representation of inside the cabin, Douglas said.
The astronauts did two full daytime iterations in the mock Orion craft through a simulated splashdown – countdown and all – and then recovery off Orion, onto the helicopters and then back onto Somerset, for training with the medical teams. Weather canceled a planned nighttime training run.
“Where can I put my feet when I put my legs out when I’m on my back, and what handholds can I grab onto? That’s all important for muscle memory, so that when you do it on a real day, you’re not imagining there’s this thing to grab here, because you remember from a year ago,” he said. “You want it as close as possible to the real vehicle because… there’s a lot of things happening in the capsule all at the same time.”
For Douglas, the training helped him to get more comfortable at sea “and be comfortable with the divers and the rescuers,” especially in exiting the craft since the astronauts will be spatially disoriented and weaker returning to land and supporting their own weight.
If he’s called for the mission – it would be to replace mission specialist Christina Koch, – one final responsibility Douglas would have is opening the hatch once Orion splashes into the Pacific.
“There are certain ways you can open the hatch. You can open it normally. You can open it with pyros,” he said. Deciding which way “is is important because you don’t want to be trapped in the hatch, and you don’t have so many consumables. It’s a big deal. So, trying to make sure we know how to operate the hatch is one of the main roles Christina is responsible for.”
Mission: Rescue
Once it’s open, astronauts likely will encounter a Navy sailor like Hospital Corpsman 2nd Class Reuben Hickox. Hickox is a diving medical technician who, in a mission to recover the astronauts, would be part of a 13-member dive and medical team that would race from the LPD aboard inflatable rubber craft toward Orion bobbing in the ocean.
“Our job as the dive team, primarily, is to safely inflate our inflatable life rings and raft to ensure that there is a safe surface for the astronauts to walk on and to transport them over to be picked up by the helicopter,” Hickox, a member of EOD Mobile Unit 1 in San Diego, told USNI News.
“Our diving medical officer, our doctor, and our independent duty corpsman are going to approach the capsule, open the door, and they’re going to be the first ones in the capsule. They’re going to do an immediate assessment on the astronauts and see how they are doing at that moment,” he said.
Meanwhile, the dive team is in the water, installing an inflatable stability collar, which circumvents the capsule, and a large life-raft they call the “porch.” This floating deck provides space for the astronauts, once out of Orion, to be checked again and, after it’s moved away from the capsule, they are placed in the hoist collars for retrieval by the search-and-rescue technicians on the Navy helicopters.
Hickox and the team have done extensive training for the mission, including recent training at NASA’s buoyancy lab in Texas. “They could simulate any sort of conditions that we would experience,” including night conditions, he said.
“I’d never in my wildest dreams thought I would ever work with NASA. I never thought I’d be in the same room as an astronaut. So when my chief told me that he wanted me to be involved with the operation, I was really excited. I get to work with NASA. That’s cool in and of itself,” he added. “Part of the operation is actually getting the astronauts in the capsule for the practice. We took them onto our boats and we got to chat with them.”
Recovering astronauts is a joint team effort.
Aboard Somerset last week, members of 1st Air Force Detachment 3 “were in the med bay, on the bridge, in the well deck, everywhere. Basically, we’re the continuity in the training from ship to ship to ship to ship,” Lt. Col. David Mahan, who commands 1st Air Force Detachment 3 at Patrick AFB in Florida, told USNI News. Others were in the simulator “where they teach the ship how to drive up to the capsule.”
His unit’s main job is integrating Department of Defense assets and capabilities to support human space flights, and its rescue forces are on alert for global missions that can include support for NASA astronauts returning from Soyuz missions. The 55-member unit, which includes retired Navy SEALs, survival specialists and ship drivers, along with contractors, swells to about 150 when organized for the rescue and recovery with fixed- and rotary-wing aircraft. Like the Navy, the unit has supported NASA’s crewed missions since its early days of human spaceflight.
“The biggest takeaway from this is how much of a joint effort this is. It’s not just the Navy. It’s not just the Air Force,” Mahan, a veteran C-17 pilot, said. “There were Marines on the ship with us. The Coast Guard is a part of certain aspects (and) is potentially going to be a part of our validation of that as well. So it truly is a joint effort doing this mission.”
For Artemis II, Mahan said that his unit, along with supporting the LPD mission, “will also have the Air Force global rescue on alert, ready to go, just in case something goes wrong.”
“They could land in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, and our rescue forces would literally be in a C-17 (transport aircraft) … and they’ll run out and parachute in the middle of the ocean,” he said. “Then they’ll pull the astronauts out. They’re prepped to survive for up to 72 hours with the astronauts, with full critical medical care in the ocean.”
NASA has specific requirements for DOD that “if it’s within a certain amount of distance, we need them out in this amount of time,” he said. So if an issue arises after launch, “we’ve got three hours to have them headed to a hospital.” The unit will be practicing those skills and processes with a C-17 and NASA astronauts in an upcoming training exercise on the East Coast.
