Logo text
The return of the longest manned space flight in history attracted a large audience of television viewers on Friday evening, with ABC leading the way.
Just under 27.3 million people watched the re-entry and landing of the Artemis II mission on the six largest television news outlets. ABC, CBS, CNN, Fox News, MS NOW and NBC have special coverage of the four-person crew’s return from 7:30-8:30 PM ET.
ABC News led the way, with a simulcast presented by David Muir that also included ABC News Live and Nat Geo. It recorded 9.77 million viewers per hour, nearly double the 5 million viewers on Fox News. CBS had 4.58 million viewers for its Artemis special, 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 placed second with 946,000 viewers in the demo. It was a similar story for adults ages 18-49, with ABC’s 1.86 million viewers more than double NBC’s 705,000 viewers.
NASA’s YouTube live stream of the event also attracted a large audience. It had over 650,000 concurrent viewers during the re-entry, and as of press time, the archived video had over 22 million views (“viewing” on YouTube means at least 30 seconds of a user watching a video).
The cross-network audience for Return of Artemis II was much larger than it was at the start of the mission. According to Nielsen, 18.1 million people watched the April 1 liftoff on the same six networks plus Telemundo.
The Artemis 2 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 manned spaceflight.
THR Newsletters
Sign up to get THR news straight to your inbox every day
Subscribe subscription
