How fast does Artemis 2 land?

The question starts from a false premise: Artemis II never landed anywhere. It was a crewed lunar flyby lasting 9 days, 1 hour and 32 minutes, from April 1 to April 10, 2026, and it ended with a splashdown in the Pacific off the coast of San Diego at 8:07 p.m. EDT. The relevant speed, then, is that of the Orion capsule on its way home, and it drops dramatically within minutes: it hit the atmosphere at 400,000 ft traveling at 35 times the speed of sound and touched the water at about 20 mph, the design figure for NASA's parachute system.

The air does almost all the work. The heat shield converts the energy of hypersonic flight into heat and brings the capsule down to subsonic speed; only then do the parachutes come into play. On Artemis II the two drogue parachutes opened at 23,400 ft, when Orion was descending at 479 ft/s, and the three main parachutes deployed at 5,400 ft, slowing it to below 200 ft/s. That sequence is what brings the spacecraft down to the 20 mph of water contact.

These figures shouldn't be carried over to the Moon. There's no atmosphere to brake the descent and no parachutes to open: the descent is done entirely with engines and propellant, and so is the ascent. That's why landing on the Moon isn't Orion's job, since it only reaches lunar orbit — it falls to a separate human landing system. Under the current schedule (as of October 2026), the program's first Moon landing is Artemis IV, planned for early 2028.