San Diego, California - The four Artemis II astronauts – the first humans to travel around the moon in more than 50 years – splashed down safely off the coast of California after a historic 10-day mission.

Specialist recovery teams assisted the crew out of the Orion capsule in the Pacific Ocean near San Diego. They will then be taken to a Navy vessel and flown to NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas.

US astronauts Christina Koch, Reid Wiseman and Victor Glover, as well as Canada's Jeremy Hansen, blasted off last week aboard the Space Launch System rocket from Cape Canaveral, Florida.

The historic mission traced a figure-eight trajectory around Earth and the moon, covering close to 700,000 miles.

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The four traveled farther from our planet than any humans before, surpassing the Apollo 13 record set in 1970. At its most distant point, the spacecraft reached over 252,000 miles from Earth and came within roughly 4,000 miles of the moon's surface. No landing was planned.

During their flyby, the astronauts observed the moon for around seven hours, including views of the far side that have never before been seen. The crew also witnessed a solar eclipse from Orion's perspective, with the moon passing in front of the sun.

The US remains the only country to have put humans on the moon, with 12 astronauts walking on its surface during the Apollo missions between 1969 and 1972. The first was Neil Armstrong in 1969, and the last was Eugene Cernan in 1972.

The Artemis mission aims to return humans to the moon and establish a US base there, paving the way for missions to Mars, amid intensifying global competition for military, commercial, and scientific advantage in space.