Isaacman okays flying Artemis-2 manned, despite heat shield questions
According to an article posted today at Ars Technica, after a thorough review NASA administrator Jared Isaacman has decided to allow the Artemis-2 mission — set to launch sometime before April and slingshot around the Moon — to fly manned with four astronauts despite the serious questions that still exist about its heat shield.
The review involved a long meeting at NASA with NASA engineers, several outside but very qualified critics, as well as two reporters (for transparency).
Convened in a ninth-floor conference room at NASA Headquarters known as the Program Review Center, the meeting lasted for more than three hours. Isaacman attended much of it, though he stepped out from time to time to handle an ongoing crisis involving an unwell astronaut on orbit. He was flanked by the agency’s associate administrator, Amit Kshatriya; the agency’s chief of staff, Jackie Jester; and Lori Glaze, the acting associate administrator for NASA’s Exploration Systems Development Mission Directorate. The heat shield experts joined virtually from Houston, along with Orion Program Manager Howard Hu.
Isaacman made it clear at the outset that, after reviewing the data and discussing the matter with NASA engineers, he accepted the agency’s decision to fly Artemis II as planned. The team had his full confidence, and he hoped that by making the same experts available to Camarda and Olivas, it would ease some of their concerns.
My readers know that I have been strongly opposed to flying Artemis-2 manned, an opposition I expressed in an op-ed at PJMedia only yesterday. However, after reading this Ars Technica report, my fears are allayed somewhat by this quote:
However, toward the end of the meeting, the NASA team agreed to discuss something that “no one really liked to talk about.” This was an analysis of what would happen to Orion if large sections of the heat shield failed completely during Artemis II. Formally, this is known as a “damage tolerance evaluation,” the engineers said. Informally, it’s known as “What if we’re wrong.”
The Avcoat blocks, which are about 1.5 inches thick, are laminated onto a thick composite base of the Orion spacecraft. Inside this is a titanium framework that carries the load of the vehicle. The NASA engineers wanted to understand what would happen if large chunks of the heat shield were stripped away entirely from the composite base of Orion. So they subjected this base material to high energies for periods of 10 seconds up to 10 minutes, which is longer than the period of heating Artemis II will experience during reentry.
What they found is that, in the event of such a failure, the structure of Orion would remain solid, the crew would be safe within, and the vehicle could still land in a water-tight manner in the Pacific Ocean.
“We have the data to say, on our worst day, we’re able to deal with that if we got to that point,” one of the NASA engineers said.
This additional data is certainly reassuring. It likely means the astronauts are at less risk that previously thought.
At the same time, NASA’s approach during this whole process deserves no credit. The engineering is faulty, and they have taken the wrong approach to fixing the problem, letting schedule determine that actions.
The right approach would have been to immediately replace this heat shield in 2023, once they were aware of the issue, and fly Artemis-2 unmanned with a newly designed heat shield.
That approach, as correct as it is, would have however immediately forced a one-to-two year delay in the program, and that was something Trump and Congress would not allow. Even now they continue to pressure NASA to proceed with these manned lunar missions immediately, if not yesterday.
Thus, not surprisingly, the real fault here lies with our elected officials. They need those photo ops, even if it means they might kill someone in the process.
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
According to an article posted today at Ars Technica, after a thorough review NASA administrator Jared Isaacman has decided to allow the Artemis-2 mission — set to launch sometime before April and slingshot around the Moon — to fly manned with four astronauts despite the serious questions that still exist about its heat shield.
The review involved a long meeting at NASA with NASA engineers, several outside but very qualified critics, as well as two reporters (for transparency).
Convened in a ninth-floor conference room at NASA Headquarters known as the Program Review Center, the meeting lasted for more than three hours. Isaacman attended much of it, though he stepped out from time to time to handle an ongoing crisis involving an unwell astronaut on orbit. He was flanked by the agency’s associate administrator, Amit Kshatriya; the agency’s chief of staff, Jackie Jester; and Lori Glaze, the acting associate administrator for NASA’s Exploration Systems Development Mission Directorate. The heat shield experts joined virtually from Houston, along with Orion Program Manager Howard Hu.
Isaacman made it clear at the outset that, after reviewing the data and discussing the matter with NASA engineers, he accepted the agency’s decision to fly Artemis II as planned. The team had his full confidence, and he hoped that by making the same experts available to Camarda and Olivas, it would ease some of their concerns.
My readers know that I have been strongly opposed to flying Artemis-2 manned, an opposition I expressed in an op-ed at PJMedia only yesterday. However, after reading this Ars Technica report, my fears are allayed somewhat by this quote:
However, toward the end of the meeting, the NASA team agreed to discuss something that “no one really liked to talk about.” This was an analysis of what would happen to Orion if large sections of the heat shield failed completely during Artemis II. Formally, this is known as a “damage tolerance evaluation,” the engineers said. Informally, it’s known as “What if we’re wrong.”
The Avcoat blocks, which are about 1.5 inches thick, are laminated onto a thick composite base of the Orion spacecraft. Inside this is a titanium framework that carries the load of the vehicle. The NASA engineers wanted to understand what would happen if large chunks of the heat shield were stripped away entirely from the composite base of Orion. So they subjected this base material to high energies for periods of 10 seconds up to 10 minutes, which is longer than the period of heating Artemis II will experience during reentry.
What they found is that, in the event of such a failure, the structure of Orion would remain solid, the crew would be safe within, and the vehicle could still land in a water-tight manner in the Pacific Ocean.
“We have the data to say, on our worst day, we’re able to deal with that if we got to that point,” one of the NASA engineers said.
This additional data is certainly reassuring. It likely means the astronauts are at less risk that previously thought.
At the same time, NASA’s approach during this whole process deserves no credit. The engineering is faulty, and they have taken the wrong approach to fixing the problem, letting schedule determine that actions.
The right approach would have been to immediately replace this heat shield in 2023, once they were aware of the issue, and fly Artemis-2 unmanned with a newly designed heat shield.
That approach, as correct as it is, would have however immediately forced a one-to-two year delay in the program, and that was something Trump and Congress would not allow. Even now they continue to pressure NASA to proceed with these manned lunar missions immediately, if not yesterday.
Thus, not surprisingly, the real fault here lies with our elected officials. They need those photo ops, even if it means they might kill someone in the process.
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
Yup.
I did learn some other interesting things from this article. I had not been aware that Danny Olivas had registered objections. I also learned that the concerns of the Artemis II crew were initially stronger than I had known about.
Well. I think it was worthwhile to get the transparency of having Berger and Maidenberg present through this entire meeting, and that Isaacmen forced them to talk it over with Camarda and Olivas. I think all of this was more than we were ever going to get from Bill Nelson, Jim Free, or Sean Duffy. I think, maybe a little more than I did, that this mission should survive reentry. But as you say, Bob, this is a rum way to run a show.
I found it fascinating that there was only one brief mention of the ELCSS being “untested”. I for one would be very hesitant to take my butt 250,000 miles from home with my breathable air source being untested. Might not even make it to being roasted by the failed heat shield.
I would volunteer to ride in Orion this go around, or to stay on ISS even without a lifeboat. Sometimes you have to take a risk.
Starship I would not touch with someone else’s 10 foot….pole.
I wonder if they plan on taking oxygen candles and carbon dioxide absorbers as backup?. That could solve the breathing issue with life support. Does it help with heating and cooling? Not so much. While I am a little more understanding of the risk level, I still have reservations.
“Thus, not surprisingly, the real fault here lies with our elected officials. They need those photo ops, even if it means they might kill someone in the process.”
Which is why we have elections; so those same elected officials are accountable to The People. Administrators like Isaacman are not elected, but the people putting them there, are. In a perverse way, the current controversy about Artemis II shows that the system is working; the people making the decisions, have to answer.
Blair Ivey: Which is why the ultimate fault here is with the voters, who have let themselves be conned by the crowd in Washington for decades, not just with Artemis and SLS and Orion, but with hundreds and hundreds of programs, practically all of which have accomplished nothing except line the pockets of that Washington crowd, and their friends.
The Minnesota daycare fraud is hardly unique. Anyone who paid any attention for the past three decades has seen numerous similar frauds, with no consequences for the fraudsters.
We get the government we deserve. And boy, we have surely been eager to deserve less than nothing.
Folks, as a professional ECLSS engineer, I am not particularly worried about Orion’s ECLSS. It may not have flown before, but it is not that complicated and it is both very ground-testable and easily redundant. I was far more concerned about the heatshield. However, Eric Berger’s report of Isaacman’s review meeting has reassured me that it is most likely to work okay.
Orion and SLS are both horrifically expensive and effectively obsolete, but it looks like Artemis II should be okay. I think that both SLS and Orion (which I actually worked on) should be canceled just as soon as politically possible. Some parts of Artemis such as AxEMU and HLS look okay to me and are still well worth pursuing, but other parts are terrible.
SLS would have been great 20 years ago, but now it is just pathetically obsolete and expensive. Both Starship and New Glenn are better launch vehicles. (Starship isn’t fully operational yet, but it will be very soon.) Orion is slightly less obsolete, but it is far less capable than it should be.
Tom D: Thank you for a very reasoned look at this mess. Personally, I think SLS was obsolete 20 years ago. It is simply a poor man’s version of a Saturn-5, and that was something we did in the 1960s.
You should look at my top post. NASA does not appear as sanguine about the life support system as you. At least, they think it needs at least a little shakedown in orbit prior to heading to the Moon.
To be sure, *SLS* technically did not exist 20 years ago — but the super heavy lift rocket design that it was derived from, Ares V, was actively on the drawing board. And it is striking how NASA’s promotional verbiage at the time spoke quite a lot about its “unprecedented” cargo mass and volume capability (which was true) but very little about it being state of art, which can hardly surprise us when it was based on propulsion systems designed (and in some cases, actually fabricated!) all the way back in the 1960’s and 70’s. But that was the tradeoff they used to sell it: save development cost and time by leveraging existing systems from the STS architecture to the maximum extent possible, even if that meant it wouldn’t be advancing the state of art.
That such a tradeoff maximized the retention of existing NASA contractor and center workforces and campaign donations ande votes that generated from those might be the *real* selling point doesn’t bear talking much about, of course, even as the promised cost and schedule savings never, uh, materialized.
I recall something VSECOTSPE (who was in a senior position at NASA HQ at the time) said about Mike Griffin’s stubborn insistence on adopting this strategy, and what really motivated him to insist on such obscolescent architectures. Again, we are all enemies to speculation. But it does make you wonder:
https://forum.nasaspaceflight.com/index.php?topic=58212.msg2623068#msg2623068
Meanwhile, Mike Griffin is still out there urging that the entire HLS program be scrapped and a cost-plus NASA-developed lander developed in its place, and major upgrades be made to SLS so that it can launch it, no doubt at a price tag that could probably obtain Greenland for Donald Tump. But I guess it’s natural for him to pick this hill to die on, since he’s been living on it for over 20 years.
It’s clear to me that Congressional influence, aimed at rewarding favored contractors and well-connected districts, was key to the SLS’s creation. Another fellow on NSF, with long experience at NASA and dealing with Congress, has written about how members of Congress don’t have any real interest in space except as to how it might contribute to their own power base. The SLS wasn’t chosen because we needed it, or because it made technical, fiscal, or operational sense, but because a handful of senators and Congressmen wanted to spend federal money in their districts, and weren’t too concerned about what value the country as a whole got in return.
A new development in this story today: Charlie Camarda has posted a response on his LinkedIn page to Eric Berger’s article, and it is . . . rather passionate. He is . . . not a happy camper. To put it mildly. He does not appear to have been at all mollified by what he heard at the meeting at NASA.
I cannot grab the link, because for some reason my LinkedIn access is locked up and I don’t know when they’ll get back to me to resolve it. What I do have is screenshots that Pierre Lionnet has taken of Charlie’s essay and posted on his X page.
https://x.com/LionnetPierre/status/2009986952670630196
EDIT: Camarda is on X (I did not know that), and he has linked to the LinkedIn response on his X page (I think you still need a LinkedIn account to access it):
https://x.com/CharlieCamarda/status/2009749200729219419
Key passage from Charlie: “I hope Jared understands what a challenging job he will have trying to fix the culture at NASA. If these are the people he is relying on to keep our crews safe, our only hope is to have faith in God and pray. I hope Jared sees the issues and will have the courage to do what is necessary.”
Wow.
P.S. to my last (which is in moderation, presumably because of the hyperlinks): Bob, I wonder if Dr Camarda wouldn’t be interested in having an interview with you, given your prominence in pushing hard in public on the heat shield issues with Orion? It’s just a thought; I have no idea if that’s something you’d be able or willing to pursue, or if it is something Camarda would want to do, either. But I would certainly be very interested to hear/read such a thing.