Great read and interesting article. Hard to believe that NASA would risk astronauts lives simply to save face, but that appears to be what's going to happen.
This is a concerning read, I'm not quite sure what the driving motivation is for Artemis, but the following answered at least part of my question -
> That context is a moon program that has spent close to $100 billion and 25 years with nothing to show for itself, at an agency that has just experienced mass firings and been through a near-death experience with its science budget
The author seems to have a pretty extensive history of… strong disdain for Artemis II. While has mentioned concerns about the heat shield before it was in the context of a laundry list of complaints, and it was nowhere close to the top.
I’m not a rocket scientist, but then neither is the author.
> if a commercial crew capsule (SpaceX Dragon or Boeing Starliner) returned to Earth with the kind of damage seen on Orion, NASA would insist on a redesign and an unmanned test flight to validate it.
> “Our test facilities can’t reach the combination of heat flux, pressure, shear stresses, etc., that an actual reentering spacecraft does. We’re always having to wait for the flight test to get the final certification that our system is good to go.”—Jeremy VanderKam, deputy manager for Orion’s heat shield, speaking in 2022
> The trouble is that the heat shield on Orion blows chunks. Not in some figurative, pejorative sense, but in the sense that when NASA flew this exact mission in 2022, large pieces of material blew out of Orion’s heat shield during re-entry, leaving divots. Large bolts embedded in the heat shield also partially eroded and melted through.
Fun wording. This isn't news, concerns have been raised about Artemis II saftey in the past 3+ years since Artemis I and before then as well.
I am very not brave but I'd volunteer. The trip is far more awesome than anything I have planned for the rest of my life. And if the shield fails on reentry it would only hurt for a few seconds. So if the crew and the backups and their backups read this and have second thoughts, ping me.
I haven't kept up with Artemis development but I've read extensively about Challenger and Columbia. These two parts of the article stood out to me:
> Moon-to-Mars Deputy Administrator Amit Kshatriya said: “it was very small localized areas. Interestingly, it would be much easier for us to analyze if we had larger chunks and it was more defined”. A Lockheed Martin representative on the same call added that "there was a healthy margin remaining of that virgin Avcoat. So it wasn’t like there were large, large chunks.”
Followed by:
> The Avcoat material is not designed to come out in chunks. It is supposed to char and flake off smoothly, maintaining the overall contours of the heat shield.
This is echoes both Shuttle incidents. Challenger: no gasses were supposed to make it past the o-rings no matter what, but when it became clear that gasses were escaping and the o-rings were being damaged, there was a push to suggest that it's an acceptable level.
There was a similar situation with heat shield damage and Columbia.
In both cases some models were used to justify the decision, with wild extrapolations and fundamentally, a design that wasn't expected to fail in that mode /at all/.
I know the points that astronauts make about the importance of manned space exploration, but I agree with this author that it seems to make sense to run this as an unmanned mission, and probably test the new heat shield which will replace the Artemis II design in an unmanned re-entry as well.
>In both cases some models were used to justify the decision, with wild extrapolations and fundamentally, a design that wasn't expected to fail in that mode /at all/.
Because, and it speaks volumes that nobody ever circles back around to this, that is absolutely f-ing normal. If everyone ran around like the sky was falling every time some widget made it into service and some unexpected thing was noticed nothing would get done.
"hey we disassembled this gearbox and there's a little rust from condensation + chemistry = cyclic usage, we better take a look at it"
"we've taken a look at it and the corrosion is forming because X, this is fine because the surfaces that can't rust see lubricant flow and the per our calculations the maximum amount of rust into the lube is Y and since the service interval is Z this is fine, tests confirm this."
^ the above happened for a multimillion dollar per hour of downtime gearbox. That was 40yr ago. It was in fact fine. I know it was fine because they added venting suggestions to the docs and the client balked because they bought another one in the 2010s and a bunch of "we went over this when it was installed and it was fine then and the building is even more tightly humidity controlled than it was in the 1980s" back and fourth whining ensued.
You don't know how many other things they noticed when they put the shuttles into service that did in fact turn out to be perfectly fine. It's real easy to be smug in hindsight but good luck trying to pick the needle out of the haystack in advance.
Now obviously the shuttle people flubbed it and much has been writtenn about it, but the point still sands.
What I don't get is why the heck are the astronauts willing to risk their lives on something they must know by now is so dangerous? Is it really better to risk death than to risk getting fired?
Definitely concerned to hear but I’m hopeful that the core of nasa is intact. They’re some of the kindest and smartest people I’ve had the pleasure of meeting. They don’t joke around with lives on the line. I hope the best for everyone involved. I’ll be watching the launch of Artemis 2 and 3 with excitement and hope.
They don't? They sure seemed to back when they ignored the engineers and launched Challenger, and again with Columbia. And those were times when the country had competent political leadership instead of a complete clown-show.
I have very, very little faith in NASA at this point after seeing how much the administration has wrecked other federal agencies like the CDC and NHS. There's no way I'd fly on that thing.
As someone who is actually (still) a fan of basic research, Artemis looks like a fun time for the 1% with a $100 billion dollar price tag, except that since it's only 4 astronauts and support staff, it's less than 1%. I opposed messing with NASA funding for a long time, but arguments referencing spin-off tech and so on wear thin. Spin-off occurring lately would/could only be captured by existing billionaires anyway, and without much benefit for society in general.
Humans in space are currently still a waste of time/money, largely just a big surrender to PR, space-selfies, the attention economy, and the general emphasis on "seem not be" you see elsewhere. Please just send robots, build a base, and let us know when we can put more than ~10 freaking people up there at one time. If that fails, then at least we'll have results in robotics research that can be applicable elsewhere on Earth right now as well as help us achieve the more grand ambitions later.
House is on fire, has been for a while, fuck business as usual. I honestly think all those smart people ought to be charged with things like using their operations research to improve government generally, or with larger-scale high tech job programs. If you don't want to let NASA big-brains try to fix healthcare, we could at least let them fix the DMV. Hell, let them keep their spin-offs too, so they actually want success, and have some part of their budget that won't disappear. Basic research and fundamental science is (still) something we need, but we need to be far more strategic about it.
Food for thought: The way things are going, we can definitely look forward to a NASA that's completely transformed into an informal, but publicly funded, research/telemetry arm for billionaire asteroid-mining operations, and thus more of the "public risk, private-profits" thing while we pad margins for people who are doing fine without the help. OTOH, if NASA is running asteroid mining businesses at huge profits, then they can do whatever they want with squishy volunteers as a sideshow, and maybe we'll have enough cash left over to fund basic income.
Someone please answer my obvious question. We sent successful missions to the moon sixty years ago. What heat shield material was used for the Apollo capsules, and why would we need something different now? Are the Artemis mission parameters totally different in a way that requires a new design? Or was Apollo incredibly dangerous and we got lucky they didn’t all fail catastrophically? The article mentions Orion is much heavier than the Apollo capsules, does that really require a totally novel heat shield that takes $billions to develop?
Arguably, the goal isnt to go to the moon. Thats the mission, but the goal is to improve our capabilities of space travel. Improving our understanding and engineering of heat shields is one such case
Camarda is an outlier. The engineers at NASA believe it is safe. The astronauts believe it is safe. Former astronaut Danny Olivas was initially skeptical of the heat shield but came around.
And note that the OP believes it is likely (maybe very likely) that the heat shield will work fine. It's hard for me to reconcile "It is likely that Artemis II will land safely" with "Artemis II is Not Safe to Fly", unless maybe getting clicks is involved.
Regardless, this is not a Challenger or Columbia situation. In both Challenger and Columbia, nobody bothered to analyze the problem because they didn't think there was a problem. That's the difference, in my opinion. NASA is taking this seriously and has analyzed the problem deeply.
They are not YOLO'ing this mission, and it's somewhat insulting that people think they are.
They have analyzed the problem with 1D non-coupled models that are so poorly matched to reality they would receive an F in a high school science class.
They are YOLOing it. It is insulting that clowns like yourself continue to cover for them.
NASA lowers its standards every time an accident happens. When they designed Shuttle, they intended for a failure rate of 1 in 10,000 or thereabouts.
Remember, it was meant to fly dozens of times per year. At the real failure rate, we would have lost dozens of Shuttles by now. The public would have shut NASA down in protest for massacring astronauts.
Good job moving the goalposts.
> They just slink away, and then when the next event happens, they cry wolf again. When they happen to be right 2 of ~130 times, they get to say "see I told you so!" and go on speaking tours about how they figured it out but NASA wouldn't listen, say they should be considered for a leadership position in NASA etc.
NASA does not have a single model that accurately predicts the heatshield damage. They are lying about this fact and crossing their fingers that all is okay. That might work in SWE's little AWS and GCP world, it doesn't work during hypersonic reentry. IOW they are gambling.
If you have a college degree, especially one that taught statistics, put it in a shredder and remove it from your CV. This is embarrassing.
It's kind of sad that we've become so risk averse. Risks should be fully disclosed but let the adventurers adventure.
Would Columbus' ship ever have been allowed to sail in the modern day? Proximity wingsuit flying and free-climbing is legal and people choose to do it even though the probability of death is extremely high. Spaceflight is significantly safer and far more beneficial to humanity, yet we block it. No one counts the lives lost due to slowing scientific progress but we should. How much further behind would we be scientifically if Darwin hadn't ventured out on the Beagle due to endless safety reviews. Would the US be what it is today if Lewis and Clark had to prove to congress that the trip was safe?
Given the opportunity, many of us would choose to die as part of a grand adventure in service to humanity vs. wither away of old age.
> That context is a moon program that has spent close to $100 billion and 25 years with nothing to show for itself, at an agency that has just experienced mass firings and been through a near-death experience with its science budget. The charismatic new Administrator has staked his reputation on increasing launch cadence, and set an explicit goal of landing astronauts on the Moon before President Trump’s term expires in January of 2029.
This is the most frustrating part. The Pentagon can fail the same audit multiple times and be missing trillions of taxpayer dollars but NASA has to move heaven and earth to show their relatively paltry $100B budget isn't going to waste. I'm tired of the double standards.
I didn’t even have a strong interest in space before the dude started writing about it. Maciej could write about literal rocks and make it worthwhile to read.
I wonder what the heat shield engineers actually think of this. It's my understanding that in the Challenger disaster, the engineers were aware of the problem and tried to do something about it, but management weren't having it
If you are serious about moon, there should be dozen of unmanned landers setting up the infrastructure before first human landers. There should be plenty of time to test human rated stuff multiple times. This is only problem because it's second mission and right with humans. If it was 24th and first human mission all these unknowns would be solved.
Ergo the mission design is wrong, not the heat shield design.
It's not actually Avcoat.
It was changed by LM.
Thw honeycomb was removed.
Imagine a beehive with no honeycomb and a slop of honey is what you have. Crystallized/solid honey, but honey never the less.
It is still Avcoat, that's just the name for the epoxy+silica 'honey.' But yeah they got rid of the honeycomb structure due to labour to manually fill the cells costing too much. Seems like kind of a dumb place to draw a line with the budget considering all the overruns it already has, means that now the Avcoat is being used in a design it wasn't originally meant for
80 comments
[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 87.4 ms ] thread> That context is a moon program that has spent close to $100 billion and 25 years with nothing to show for itself, at an agency that has just experienced mass firings and been through a near-death experience with its science budget
I’m not a rocket scientist, but then neither is the author.
Are you sure about that?
https://spaceflightnow.com/2022/05/24/spacex-swapping-heat-s...
Anyone know if there's a detailed response from NASA to the article?
This is a strange claim, considering NASA used to have 2 facilities that were capable of this - one at Johnson and one at Ames. They were consolidated (https://ntrs.nasa.gov/api/citations/20160001258/downloads/20...) but it seems like the Arc Jet Complex at Ames is still operational https://www.nasa.gov/ames/arcjet-complex/
Fun wording. This isn't news, concerns have been raised about Artemis II saftey in the past 3+ years since Artemis I and before then as well.
Is Orion’s heat shield really safe? New NASA chief conducts final review on eve of flight. https://arstechnica.com/space/2026/01/nasa-chief-reviews-ori...
> Moon-to-Mars Deputy Administrator Amit Kshatriya said: “it was very small localized areas. Interestingly, it would be much easier for us to analyze if we had larger chunks and it was more defined”. A Lockheed Martin representative on the same call added that "there was a healthy margin remaining of that virgin Avcoat. So it wasn’t like there were large, large chunks.”
Followed by:
> The Avcoat material is not designed to come out in chunks. It is supposed to char and flake off smoothly, maintaining the overall contours of the heat shield.
This is echoes both Shuttle incidents. Challenger: no gasses were supposed to make it past the o-rings no matter what, but when it became clear that gasses were escaping and the o-rings were being damaged, there was a push to suggest that it's an acceptable level.
There was a similar situation with heat shield damage and Columbia.
In both cases some models were used to justify the decision, with wild extrapolations and fundamentally, a design that wasn't expected to fail in that mode /at all/.
I know the points that astronauts make about the importance of manned space exploration, but I agree with this author that it seems to make sense to run this as an unmanned mission, and probably test the new heat shield which will replace the Artemis II design in an unmanned re-entry as well.
Because, and it speaks volumes that nobody ever circles back around to this, that is absolutely f-ing normal. If everyone ran around like the sky was falling every time some widget made it into service and some unexpected thing was noticed nothing would get done.
"hey we disassembled this gearbox and there's a little rust from condensation + chemistry = cyclic usage, we better take a look at it"
"we've taken a look at it and the corrosion is forming because X, this is fine because the surfaces that can't rust see lubricant flow and the per our calculations the maximum amount of rust into the lube is Y and since the service interval is Z this is fine, tests confirm this."
^ the above happened for a multimillion dollar per hour of downtime gearbox. That was 40yr ago. It was in fact fine. I know it was fine because they added venting suggestions to the docs and the client balked because they bought another one in the 2010s and a bunch of "we went over this when it was installed and it was fine then and the building is even more tightly humidity controlled than it was in the 1980s" back and fourth whining ensued.
You don't know how many other things they noticed when they put the shuttles into service that did in fact turn out to be perfectly fine. It's real easy to be smug in hindsight but good luck trying to pick the needle out of the haystack in advance.
Now obviously the shuttle people flubbed it and much has been writtenn about it, but the point still sands.
They don't? They sure seemed to back when they ignored the engineers and launched Challenger, and again with Columbia. And those were times when the country had competent political leadership instead of a complete clown-show.
I have very, very little faith in NASA at this point after seeing how much the administration has wrecked other federal agencies like the CDC and NHS. There's no way I'd fly on that thing.
Humans in space are currently still a waste of time/money, largely just a big surrender to PR, space-selfies, the attention economy, and the general emphasis on "seem not be" you see elsewhere. Please just send robots, build a base, and let us know when we can put more than ~10 freaking people up there at one time. If that fails, then at least we'll have results in robotics research that can be applicable elsewhere on Earth right now as well as help us achieve the more grand ambitions later.
House is on fire, has been for a while, fuck business as usual. I honestly think all those smart people ought to be charged with things like using their operations research to improve government generally, or with larger-scale high tech job programs. If you don't want to let NASA big-brains try to fix healthcare, we could at least let them fix the DMV. Hell, let them keep their spin-offs too, so they actually want success, and have some part of their budget that won't disappear. Basic research and fundamental science is (still) something we need, but we need to be far more strategic about it.
Food for thought: The way things are going, we can definitely look forward to a NASA that's completely transformed into an informal, but publicly funded, research/telemetry arm for billionaire asteroid-mining operations, and thus more of the "public risk, private-profits" thing while we pad margins for people who are doing fine without the help. OTOH, if NASA is running asteroid mining businesses at huge profits, then they can do whatever they want with squishy volunteers as a sideshow, and maybe we'll have enough cash left over to fund basic income.
https://arstechnica.com/space/2026/01/nasa-chief-reviews-ori...
Camarda is an outlier. The engineers at NASA believe it is safe. The astronauts believe it is safe. Former astronaut Danny Olivas was initially skeptical of the heat shield but came around.
And note that the OP believes it is likely (maybe very likely) that the heat shield will work fine. It's hard for me to reconcile "It is likely that Artemis II will land safely" with "Artemis II is Not Safe to Fly", unless maybe getting clicks is involved.
Regardless, this is not a Challenger or Columbia situation. In both Challenger and Columbia, nobody bothered to analyze the problem because they didn't think there was a problem. That's the difference, in my opinion. NASA is taking this seriously and has analyzed the problem deeply.
They are not YOLO'ing this mission, and it's somewhat insulting that people think they are.
They are YOLOing it. It is insulting that clowns like yourself continue to cover for them.
NASA lowers its standards every time an accident happens. When they designed Shuttle, they intended for a failure rate of 1 in 10,000 or thereabouts.
Remember, it was meant to fly dozens of times per year. At the real failure rate, we would have lost dozens of Shuttles by now. The public would have shut NASA down in protest for massacring astronauts.
Good job moving the goalposts.
> They just slink away, and then when the next event happens, they cry wolf again. When they happen to be right 2 of ~130 times, they get to say "see I told you so!" and go on speaking tours about how they figured it out but NASA wouldn't listen, say they should be considered for a leadership position in NASA etc.
NASA does not have a single model that accurately predicts the heatshield damage. They are lying about this fact and crossing their fingers that all is okay. That might work in SWE's little AWS and GCP world, it doesn't work during hypersonic reentry. IOW they are gambling.
If you have a college degree, especially one that taught statistics, put it in a shredder and remove it from your CV. This is embarrassing.
Would Columbus' ship ever have been allowed to sail in the modern day? Proximity wingsuit flying and free-climbing is legal and people choose to do it even though the probability of death is extremely high. Spaceflight is significantly safer and far more beneficial to humanity, yet we block it. No one counts the lives lost due to slowing scientific progress but we should. How much further behind would we be scientifically if Darwin hadn't ventured out on the Beagle due to endless safety reviews. Would the US be what it is today if Lewis and Clark had to prove to congress that the trip was safe?
Given the opportunity, many of us would choose to die as part of a grand adventure in service to humanity vs. wither away of old age.
This is the most frustrating part. The Pentagon can fail the same audit multiple times and be missing trillions of taxpayer dollars but NASA has to move heaven and earth to show their relatively paltry $100B budget isn't going to waste. I'm tired of the double standards.
It reminds me of both the movies Capricorn 1 and Iron Sky ... and not in any good way.
if author is reading this, you should fix this maybe.
I didn’t even have a strong interest in space before the dude started writing about it. Maciej could write about literal rocks and make it worthwhile to read.
Ergo the mission design is wrong, not the heat shield design.