The return of the longest crewed space flight in history drew a big TV audience Friday evening, with ABC’s coverage leading the way.
Just under 27.3 million people watched the re-entry and splashdown of the Artemis II mission on the six largest TV news outlets. ABC, CBS, CNN, Fox News, MS NOW and NBC all carried special coverage of the four-person crew’s return from 7:30-8:30 p.m. ET.
ABC News led the way, with a simulcast anchored by David Muir that also included ABC News Live and Nat Geo. It scored 9.77 million viewers for the hour, almost doubling the 5 million viewers who watched on Fox News. CBS had 4.58 million viewers for its Artemis special report, followed by NBC (3.91 million), CNN (2.65 million) and MS NOW (1.38 million).
ABC also led among adults 25-54, the key demographic for news programming, with 2.36 million viewers; NBC was second with 946,000 viewers in the demo. The story was similar for adults 18-49, where ABC’s 1.86 million viewers more than doubled NBC’s 705,000.
NASA’s YouTube live stream of the event also pulled in a sizable audience. It had more than 650,000 simultaneous viewers during re-entry, and as of publication time, the archived video has more than 22 million views (a “view” on YouTube means at least 30 seconds of a user watching a video).
The cross-network audience for Artemis II’s return was significantly larger than it was for the mission’s start. According to Nielsen, 18.1 million people watched the April 1 liftoff on the those same six networks plus Telemundo.
The Artemis II mission carried its crew around the far side of the moon, breaking Apollo 13’s record for the farthest distance from Earth ever traveled by a crewed space flight.
