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

NASA this week began the stacking one of the two strap-on solid-fueled boosters that will help power SLS on the Artemis-3 mission, still officially scheduled for September 2025 and aiming to send four astronauts around the Moon.

A NASA spokesperson told Ars it should take around four months to fully stack the SLS rocket for Artemis II. First, teams will stack the two solid-fueled boosters piece by piece, then place the core stage in between the boosters. Then, technicians will install a cone-shaped adapter on top of the core stage and finally hoist the interim cryogenic propulsion stage, or upper stage, to complete the assembly.

At that point the rocket will be ready for the integration of the manned Orion capsule on top.

The article at the link sees this stacking as a good sign that NASA’s has solved the Orion capsule’s heat shield issue that occurred during the unmanned return from the Moon on the second Artemis mission. The image to the right shows that heat shield afterward, with large chunks missing. Though it landed safely, the damage was much much worse than expected. At the moment NASA officials have said it has found the root cause, but those officials also refuse to say what that root cause is, nor how the agency or Orion’s contractor Lockheed Martin has fixed it.

I don’t see it that way. What I see is evidence that NASA management is pushing forward on preparing for this mission in order to make it more difficult for the new Trump administration to cancel it. For one thing, once it stacks the solid rocket boosters, it is supposed to use them within one year, because there is a concern the vertical orientation might warp the solid-fuel and cause the boosters to burn incorrectly during launch. On the second unmanned flight, NASA waived this rule, launching two years after stacking with no problems.

That however was an unmanned mission. The risk was less. Nor did NASA know about at serious heat shield issue. Furthermore, this first manned Artemis mission will be the first time Orion’s environmental system, designed to make the capsule habitable for humans, will be installed and used. And it will be doing that on the first test flight with four humans on board.

It seems to me that political reasons NASA is moving forward to fly humans on a very risky mission, with a rocket that has only flown once with questionable solid-fueled boosters, with a capsule with an untested environmental system and a questionable heat shield.

This decision seems to be a repeat of the NASA culture that killed astronauts on two different shuttle missions: “Let’s ignore the obvious and serious engineering issues so we can keep flying so that no one will cancel our program!” (That NASA’s safety panel has had nothing to say about all this only proves my assertion for years that this panel is corrupt and useless.)

The decision by NASA to push forward should instead be the precise reason the Trump administration should consider cancelling SLS and Orion entirely. Trump needs to bite the bullet, to accept the delays such a decision would cause to the entire program, and to rethink things so it can fly its astronauts to the Moon in a safe and proper manner, using privately built hardware that is designed better, tested more thoroughly, and can actually do the job cheaper and faster.

Whether Trump will do so is unclear. And even if he attempts it we know from past history — when Obama tried to do the same thing back in 2010 — that Congress might push back and reinstate SLS regardless.

To cancel SLS/Orion is going to take a major political effort. It might be the right thing to do, but who knows if anyone in Washington really has the courage to do it.