Orion just after main parachute deployment

Orion successfully survived re-entry tonight with its questionable heat shield, with the capsule splashing down off the coast of California at 8:07 pm (Eastern).

All four astronauts are healthy and safe. As of posting they were still in the capsule, floating on the ocean, with recovery crews on their way to it. [Update: those recovery crews, six boats with more than 40 people, are taking an ungodly amount of time to latch onto the capsule and begin recovery. Over an hour after splashdown the crew is still in the capsule.]

The Artemis-2 mission is now over, though the final condition of that heat shield still needs to be analyzed. In addition, engineers need figure out how to fix a bunch of other issues that took place during the mission:

• A leak in an internal helium tank on Europe’s service module
• Communication drop-outs several times
• the endless issues with Orion’s toilet

There were other minor issues that cropped up repeatedly, none significant but all of which should be fixed. And though it will be helpful to determine how this heat shield performed, it should be noted that the data is essentially irrelevant to future missions. The next mission, Artemis-3, will use a completely different design, and test it for the first time on a manned flight. That flight however will be in Earth orbit, so the stress on the shield will be far less than this return, even with the changed re-entry path.

Though many will call this lunar fly-by “historic,” it will likely be little remembered by future generations. It did little to move the settlement of the solar system forward. No truly useful engineering was tested. The rocket and capsule are engineering dead-ends. Neither will be of much use for establishing colonies on the Moon or Mars, as SLS is still too expensive and too difficult to stack and launch and Orion is too small for any interplanetary missions, being nothing more than an overweight and very expensive ascent/descent capsule.

The only plus of this mission is that it will likely give NASA’s administrator, Jared Isaacman, the political clout to institute major changes in the entire Artemis program, changes that could make the American colonization of the solar system more likely. There are strong indications that he wants to make better use of the private sector.

And that private sector is poised to bypass NASA, regardless of what NASA wants or tries to do, with capabilities far better then anything we have seen since the Apollo program.