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What bad news is NASA hiding about the heat shield it will use on the next Orion/SLS manned mission around the Moon?

Orion's damage heat shield
Damage to Orion heat shield caused during re-entry in 2022,
including “cavities resulting from the loss of large chunks”

Even as our uneducated media goes bonkers over another Musk kerfuffle, this time with interim NASA administration Sean Duffy, it is ignoring what now appears to be a strong effort by NASA to cover up some serious issues with the Orion capsule’s heat shield, issues that might be far more serious than outlined in a May 2024 inspector general (IG) report.

That IG report [pdf] found the following:

Specifically, portions of the char layer wore away differently than NASA engineers predicted, cracking and breaking off the spacecraft in fragments that created a trail of debris rather than melting away as designed (see Figure 3 [shown to the right]). The unexpected behavior of the Avcoat creates a risk that the heat shield may not sufficiently protect the capsule’s systems and crew from the extreme heat of reentry on future missions. Moreover, while there was no evidence of impact with the Crew Module, the quantity and size of the debris could have caused enough structural damage to cause one of Orion’s parachutes to fail. Should the same issue occur on future Artemis missions, it could lead to the loss of the vehicle or crew.

In our judgment, the unexpected behavior of the heat shield poses a significant risk to the safety of
future crewed missions.
[emphasis mine]

NASA spent the next few months reviewing the situation, and decided in December 2024 that it did not have the time or funding to redesign and replace the heat shield before the next flight. Instead, it chose to fly the next manned Orion mission — dubbed Artemis-2 and scheduled for the spring of 2026 carrying four astronauts around the Moon — using this same heat shield design but change the flight path during reentry to reduce stress on the shield.

NASA also admitted then that this heat shield design is defective, and that it will replace it beginning with the next mission, Artemis-3, the one that the agency hopes will land people back on the Moon.

The decision to fly humans in a capsule with such a known untrustworthy heat shield design is bad enough. Any rational person would not do this (as the inspector general above concluded). Yet NASA is going ahead, because it has determined that meeting its schedule, getting Americans back to the lunar surface ahead of China and during Trump’s present term of office, is more important than rational engineering and testing.

What now makes this decision even more worrisome is that it appears NASA is covering up the findings of its own engineers, completed in August 2024 but not made public until now.

A typical sampling of four pages of NASA Orion heat shield report
Four very typical pages from NASA’s Orion heat shield report

The problem is that the report has not been made public. It was released this week, but every page is redacted, as shown to the right, so that the entire report is censored. It is very clear NASA’s engineers recognized serious issues with the heat shield, but NASA has chosen to prevent the public from reading those conclusions.

Why would NASA do this? By law NASA is supposed to be transparent, releasing all its findings without any censorship. Moreover, its work on Orion has no real national security concerns. The State Department might want some specific technical details redacted to prevent U.S. technology from being stolen by hostile powers like China or North Korea or Russia, but there would be no reason to block out every single word.

NASA’s decision to redact every page as shown indicates NASA is hiding some really worrisome information, information that would make its decision to fly Orion manned around the Moon using this heat shield design very questionable, and maybe even insane.

This is the Challenger and Columbia culture all over again. NASA has put aside engineering and made management and scheduling issues its primary consideration, even if by doing so it risks lives and flies rockets with questionable designs.

Unless someone in the Trump administration looks into this and puts aside Trump’s desire to have a manned lunar landing by 2028, people are going to die. And if they don’t, it will not because NASA did things right, but because NASA was very very lucky.

Genesis cover

On Christmas Eve 1968 three Americans became the first humans to visit another world. What they did to celebrate was unexpected and profound, and will be remembered throughout all human history. Genesis: the Story of Apollo 8, Robert Zimmerman's classic history of humanity's first journey to another world, tells that story, and it is now available as both an ebook and an audiobook, both with a foreword by Valerie Anders and a new introduction by Robert Zimmerman.

 

The print edition can be purchased at Amazon or from any other book seller. If you want an autographed copy the price is $60 for the hardback and $45 for the paperback, plus $8 shipping for each. Go here for purchasing details. The ebook is available everywhere for $5.99 (before discount) at amazon, or direct from my ebook publisher, ebookit. If you buy it from ebookit you don't support the big tech companies and the author gets a bigger cut much sooner.


The audiobook is also available at all these vendors, and is also free with a 30-day trial membership to Audible.
 

"Not simply about one mission, [Genesis] is also the history of America's quest for the moon... Zimmerman has done a masterful job of tying disparate events together into a solid account of one of America's greatest human triumphs."--San Antonio Express-News

13 comments

  • F

    Government’s gotta government!

  • Richard M

    Hi Bob,

    Good to highlight this.

    Possible errata: I think you have the missions both off by one? The next mission, sticking with the old heat shield, is Artemis II, and it’s the Artemis III mission that will be the first to use a redesigned heat shield, right?

  • Richard M

    Hello Jeff,

    Yeah, that’s from way back on Flight 7, and the heat shield has had major redesigns since then (and it continues to iterate).

    But this is not a vehicle anywhere close to having human beings on board. It’s deep in it’s development campaign. And the first version that does have humans is going to be a lunar lander, not a vehicle that’s going to be doing Earth reentry.

  • Richard M: You are right, my numbers for the Artemis missions were one off. Now fixed. Thanks!

  • Richard M

    “NASA has put aside engineering and made management and scheduling issues its primary consideration.….”

    The schedule priority is the really blatant killer. Why isn’t NASA doing more uncrewed flight tests? Answer: Because it’s a very, very hardware poor program. The production and flight rates are so freaking low that doing such test flights would guarantee that the crewed flights wouldn’t begin until the 2030’s! And NASA knows that the politics of the program won’t allow it to wait that long.

    What does a hardware rich space vehicle program look like? Yes, you can see the obvious example right now down in Boca Chica, Texas. But NASA has history with hardware rich (well, richer) programs in its past. With Apollo, they launched 16 test flights of various Saturn rocket configurations in 1964-68 before a human ever lifted off on one. And as for the command module, they launched five into orbit, and built and tested 11 more on the ground (including, tragically, the one for Apollo 1) before Apollo 7 even happened. It was still a very risky vehicle working to politically driven tight schedules and NASA management was always honest with itself about that, but they at least had gathered a lot of hard flight test data on these vehicles before they ever risked human beings on them.

  • BillB

    Jeff Wright, I know you don’t like SpaceX from all of your negative postings about them. That picture you linked to is believed to be from IFT-4. That was seven (7) flights ago and things have changed. On IFT-11 there was no apparent problems with heat around the flaps both aft and forward. With the radical change that Starship represents from other reentry vehicles the testing can only be done as SpaceX is doing it and they are far from a manned reentry vehicle, like tens of flights more. We will have to see what things look like when SpaceX finally “lands” (catches) a Starship.

  • John

    I’ll play devil’s advocate a little regarding the heat shield issue, at least to say why they think they can fly.

    They did an extensive investigation and came to results that were agreed with by a third party. The root cause of the problem is the permeability of the avcoat material, and unforeseen gas build up from the skip reentry profile.

    If you have a good understanding of an issue, and can reproduce it, and can control the reentry conditions; then a strong argument can be made that is it reasonable to assume the risk.

    My own rebuttal to myself, is that a test flight should still be flown to prove the findings. The fact that they couldn’t build and fly anything, even a test bed(s), with new or old avcoat; in three years is ultimately fatal to their precious schedule and possibly the souls on board.

    Now links about the 2 year study, entry profiles, etc. etc. I was cutting and pasting but nope.

    Straight from the devil:
    https://www.nasa.gov/missions/artemis/nasa-identifies-cause-of-artemis-i-orion-heat-shield-char-loss/

    Arstechnia
    https://arstechnica.com/uncategorized/2024/12/nasa-says-orions-heat-shield-is-good-to-go-for-artemis-ii-but-does-it-matter/

    America space
    https://www.americaspace.com/2024/12/08/artemis-ii-orion-heatshield-update/

    Now, if they did lie about the results; and redact inconvenient data or opinions; get the tar and feathers, pitchforks and torches. Sadly, I think it’s all lies now, everything, everywhere, LIES; and that leads to one place. It’s hot there, not just reentry.

  • John: In truth, I am actually in total agreement with you. I think NASA’s engineers analyzed this to death, and came up with what they sincerely think is a solution. And like you, I think that even if this is entirely true, even if it works perfectly on Artemis-2, this is a very bad way to do business.

    I also think that their analysis showed many weak points, enough to raise serious questions, which is why NASA redacted the report. I am hoping by putting their feet to the fire we will get some blunt honest review on this subject within the Trump administration. No one wants astronauts to die because of foolishness.

  • Edward

    By flying the new fix on Artemis III without an unmanned flight test is really doing the same risky flying as using the current material in a different reentry profile. So, really, there will be two unsafe manned flights.

    I think that we can conclude that NASA did not learn from Challenger, and it did not learn from Columbia, and its safety panel (ASAP) is not doing its stated job.

  • Edward wrote, “I think that we can conclude that NASA did not learn from Challenger, and it did not learn from Columbia, and its safety panel (ASAP) is not doing its stated job.”

    I laughed when you mentioned the safety panel. As you are well aware, I have been blasting this useless and very corrupt panel for years. It is worst then useless. It must go away.

  • Richard M

    John Hare puts it well. As he says: It’s *plausible* that NASA’s engineers and their quasi-tiger team really did study the heck out of this and their modeling came up with a compelling explanation and a compelling solution.

    But there’s no substitute for flight data. – especially when human lives are at stake.

    And NASA could have made this a priority in the Orion development program after they did EFT-1 (the flight test of an Orion that was a little more than boilerplate but not a lot more, on a Delta IV Heavy in 2014) and decided to pursue an entirely different heat shield. The severe limit on the number of SLS launchers need not be a show-stopper: You set up the program to allow for up to, say, three flight tests sending a tolerably high fidelity uncrewed Orion out to an elliptical orbit for higher reentry speeds before you fly EM-1/Artemis I, and you reserve that many Delta IV Heavies (Falcon Heavy not being operational yet) with ULA. Two fully successful tests might be enough to opt out of the third, but at least you are covered if the heat shield shows problems requiring major redesign or mitigation. This would cost money but it’s – what? a couple billion more, tops? — in an Orion program that’s already cost $24 billion to date? It’s still less flight testing than the Apollo CSM, but even this would give you *some* empirical data.

    But then again, I’ve heard that certain senators were nervous about EFT-1 in the first place because it posed a risk of opening up greater perceptions for using commercial launchers in distributed launch architectures for Orion rather than SLS. Richard Shelby might well have had a litter of kittens if NASA had proposed something like this for funding.

    The real answer was to cancel *all* of this back in 2010 and make sure it stayed cancelled, of course. But I’m just taking John’s cue to think through how you could do this in a vaguely responsible manner, if you really wanted to.

  • Richard M

    I think that we can conclude that NASA did not learn from Challenger, and it did not learn from Columbia, and its safety panel (ASAP) is not doing its stated job.

    I think they definitely learned some engineering lessons from Challenger and Columbia. I think they did not learn nearly enough organizational culture lessons from them.

    Of course that did not really matter after 2011, when NASA was no longer flying people to space, and when the only looming restoration of that capability was a program (Commercial Crew) where they could outsource the cost and sweat and delays of safety margin work to the contractors, who had to swallow those costs rather than pass them on to NASA.

    Of course, this wasn’t just a problem with NASA. You should read what Eric Berger says about how Boeing handled all of this on Starliner’s development in his REENTRY book.

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