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ship off the Pacific coast near San Diego, where they all proved capable of walking unassisted.

Nasa administrator Jared Isaacman called the voyage “a perfect mission.”

“We’re back in the business of sending astronauts to the Moon,” he said, and “this is just the beginning.”

As the astronauts returned to Earth, their spacecraft reached maximum speeds more than 30 times the speed of sound, and faced searing temperatures around half as hot as the surface of the Sun.

The Orion capsule will now be painstakingly examined to assess how it fared.

US President Donald Trump praised the astronauts for their “spectacular” trip and said he “could not be more proud” -- while wasting no time in looking ahead to the eventual goal of sending missions even further into space.

“Next step, Mars!” he wrote on social media.

Artemis II was the inaugural crewed mission of Nasa’s program aiming to install a sustained presence on the Moon, including the eventual construction of a base that could be used for further exploration, including to Mars.

From liftoff to splashdown, the trip clocked in at nine days, one hour, 31 minutes and 35 seconds -- though Nasa rounds up and calls it a 10-day mission.

The four astronauts became the humans to travel furthest away from the Earth, at 252,756 miles (406,771 kilometres).

Nasa is hoping it can put boots on the lunar surface as soon as 2028 -- the final full year of Trump’s second White House term.

Experts, however, have voiced skepticism that the lunar landers being developed by SpaceX and Blue Origin, companies owned by billionaires Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos respectively, will be ready in time.

China, meanwhile, is forging ahead with its own effort targeting 2030 to put astronauts on the Moon.