Death, taxes, and the gravitationally bound return of the Artemis II mission on Friday evening. These are the only certainties in life.
Even if the four astronauts on board the Orion spacecraft discovered a serious flaw in their spacecraft today—and to be clear, from recent images reviewed by NASA experts, everything looks just fine—there is no chance of significantly altering the Artemis II mission’s inexorable return through Earth’s atmosphere on Friday. They're coming back one way or another.
Splashdown is predicted to occur at 8:07 pm ET (00:07 UTC Saturday), a few hundred miles off the coast of Southern California. In large and important ways, this is the most critical phase of the lunar flight. Here, then, is what to expect later today.