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 few months year 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.

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.