What bad news is NASA hiding about the heat shield it will use on the next Orion/SLS manned mission around the Moon?
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.
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.
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Worse
https://www.reddit.com/r/SpaceXMasterrace/comments/1i2hxta/another_day_another_leaked_starship_internal_view/
Government’s gotta government!
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?
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!
“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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I have no facts to back this up…it’s just a hunch, but I don’t think astronauts are going to fly to the moon on the next Artemis flight. The whole thing is just so egregiously risky and wrong that, after Challenger and Columbia, it’s hard for me to imagine that NASA as an entity would take this risk.
Because if they fail…if astronauts die because of the heat shield…it’s not a surprise, to all of us, like Challenger. They were amply warned.
NASA will cease to exist as anything but a paper management organization if that flight kills astronauts..
Is it paranoid to think some people want deaths during this administration to attack it?
Rob Crawford asked: “Is it paranoid to think some people want deaths during this administration to attack it?”
The current conversation between Right and Left:
“I don’t murder [people],”
“I do, if I have to”
Or, ask Ryan Routh.
I suggest that SpaceX adopt a Blue Origin legacy-style name for the modified Dragon spacecraft that it is building for NASA to use to de-orbit the ISS.
How about “New Duffy”?
@ Rob and Blair…
No one with enough knowledge to even have an opinion on this matter wishes harm on the astronauts.
To even suggest that there are folks that do ( with zero evidence ) is disingenuous at best… Using one of the tactics “the left” are regularly accused of on this forum.
A little more faith in humanity is called for here, especially regarding those of us with more than 3 functional braincells.
That being said…. Being in the middle of “Challenger: A True Story of Heroism and Disaster on the Edge of Space” by Adam Higginbotham ( an excellent if disturbing read ) , one wonders if lessons have truly been learned, and if so, enough procedural changes made.
I will be crossing everything I can both on launch and especially re-entry. As Bob says, if everything goes swimmingly it will be as much luck as due diligence.
I’ve said it before both here and elsewhere, but the obvious thing to do is fly Artemis 2 unmanned so the full-up ECLSS and the revised heat-shield-friendlier re-entry profile can be tested before any human lives are placed at risk. If all goes well, the currently designated Artemis 2 crew can then fly Artemis 3 using the same heat shield as Artemis 1 & 2. Their recompense for having to wait longer to fly is that two, and possibly three, of them get to walk on the Moon. The Canadian can stay in NRHO and mind the store while the rest are Moonwalking.
If all does not go well, then we will have dodged a bullet. The only hope of Beating the Chinese[tm] then becomes whether or not SpaceX can produce both a working and tested HLS and a working and tested SLS-Orion replacement by, say, 2028 or 2029. I’m thinking the answer to that question is yes.
The reasons there haven’t been test flights (and won’t be) is obvious. They are Cost and Schedule. Honestly this nonsense seems to derive out of the Constellation/Ares project that came out of the Bush years (2005?) and was trying to reuse remaining parts from the shuttle (RS-25, SRB parts). In 2005 it really didn’t make much sense but honestly it was all we had. Artemis resurects/reformats some of that in 2017, Falcon 9 is starting to get its legs, Dragon Crew is ~2 years late (ultimately takes off 2020), Artemis had a (ludicrous ) goal of an early 2020 moon landing.
What I think we need is a total rethink leading to perhaps a new direction and follow through. We’ve done the race to the lunar surface trick before. It is NOT worth risking 4 lives in Artemis II. The Orion capsule feels like a cobbled together, slightly improved Apollo that has intentionally included all sorts of vendors (including ESA) more to make everyone happy then as a reasonable design. None of this inspires confidence, We lost three good men rushing with Apollo 1 and nearly another 3 in Apollo 13. The shuttle killed 14 in a large part due to rushing and NASA management not wanting to admit there were issues.
Current Dragon Crew/Falcon9 is likely not up to the task as I don’t think a straight up Falcon 9 could get a Dragon Crew into a lunar orbit. Maybe a Falcon 9 heavy (although that is NOT officially man rated). Dragon Crew has a 10-day free flying upper limit currently I think Polaris Dawn is its longest untethered flight at 5 days. I don’t think Crew Dragon’s heat shield would be up to a direct or even skip reentry from lunar orbit. And there is still the matter of a descent vehicle. Lunar Starship seems best bet but that is still a ways off and needs things (eg on orbit refuel and Starship Tankers) that haven’t even been done at test levels let alone full fuel transfers. Honestly something Starship based with perhaps an Earth orbit transfer to a dedicated lunar vehicle? ISS would be a nice waypoint to use but that is kind of falling apart and has the issue of arguing with Russians, ESA and JAXA over timing. There are the commercial station designs but most of those are sadly, well moonshine.
Honestly, we need to figure out what the PURPOSE of this would be. Just to say we beat the Chinese? Seems a dumb way to waste 5-10 billion dollars (or more with Artemis perhaps 60 million). If we want more permanent or semi permanent access then there is infrastructure that needs to be made. And what the heck do we want that for? He3 experiments? Far side observatories? Future Mars Work? There is some value in learning to live in that hostile an environment (Witness Antarctica). I’m certain we’d learn more selenology and related stuff; we only looked at a few spots in our 6 landings. As much as part of me longs for Luna City, the rational part of me says, what value does it get us?
To Richard
We haven’t seen any photos of the interior of Starship on re-entry.
If you were to look at the interior of Orion, what would you see?
That is what counts.
I would gladly volunteer to ride Arty 2.
On Starship’s role to outer planets:
https://phys.org/news/2025-10-starship-uranus.html
https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/11068722
That might wind up being the best use.
In terms of my willingness to ride ANY iteration of Starship?
I’d feel safer playing Russian Roulette with a magazine-fed.
Hi Dick,
I can’t argue with making Artemis II an uncrewed test, but keeping Artemis III as the first landing attempt means, literally, trying to do a landing attempt on the very first crewed flight of Orion. That will inevitably add risk to the mission.
Jeff,
There were some brief glimpses on the Flight 10 Livestream that I recall seeing.
But again, Starship is still deep in development. It’s not remotely ready to carry crew yet. No one pretends otherwise.
Hello Bob,
Since we’re on the subject of NASA’s lack of transparency, you might be interested in what Casey Handmer had to say today:
https://x.com/CJHandmer/status/1981144777648423076
If we can’t force this out of NASA by FOIA, I wonder if pressure on the White House to lean on the agency might work?
Richard M: Musk won’t tolerate this kind of stupidity. If it gets bad enough, he WILL take his bat and ball and go home. As I and you and many others here have noted, he now has enough financing to build his own space program, without NASA. If NASA is going to cost him money, why work with it?
P.S. I don’t think it’s true that NASA never added additional requirements for Commercial Crew contractors during CCtCap. The late switch from 7 seats to 4 on Dragon to reduce g-loads is just one obvious example. I have heard word of others.
But it may be that what Phil McAlister is trying to say, as Casey has it, is that this sort of thing is happening at much greater scale with HLS and CLPS than it was with Commercial Crew or CRS.
I kinda feel like he’s getting close to that point. (I would be, too.)
And after all….SpaceX has already achieved and been paid on most of the milestones of the HLS contract, meaning they’ve already received most of that $2.9 billion. Because NASA decided to front-load the milestone payments. So….there is not much to lose by bailing out, is there?
From what I am hearing, this is a real problem with NASA management: most of them simply do not understand what it takes to close a business case on these fixed cost contracts. They think, “Yay, we’re doing it the commercial way!” without understanding what commercial vendors actually need to make it a viable proposition. It is a small miracle that Commercial LEO Destinations was finally restructured to actually reflect this on some real level. But it sounds like HLS and CLPS (or, I think, the EVA suit program) haven’t received that course correction yet.
I think McAlister (the guy who saved SpaceX;s Commercial Crew bid at the last minute in 2014) understood this. But you will note that he has been retired out now.
Richard M: Please provide a source concerning the milestone payments to SpaceX for its Starship lunar lander. It seems to me unlikely that SpaceX has “been paid most of the milestones.” All the work so far is unrelated directly with landing on the Moon (except for the development of the elevator to get the astronauts down to the ground).
Either way, I think Musk won’t walk away, but will use his considerable leverage to force NASA to back off from its stupidity. If he threatens to leave if they don’t, what can they do? Despite Duffy’s announcement this week NASA really has no other options besides SpaceX.
Hi Bob,
Jack Kuhr of Payload has a nice summary of the payouts here on his X account yesterday, with an official statement from NASA he obtained:
https://x.com/JackKuhr/status/1981012949847151083
The last milestone payment of $75,000,000 was awarded on September 26th, with $2,666,641,458 outlayed of $4,036,835,541 total current award — at least, that is the last officially released. You can see that here on the official USA Spending contract page:
https://www.usaspending.gov/award/CONT_AWD_80MSFC20C0034_8000_-NONE-_-NONE-
You can see the accompanying graph that Kuhr notes in his X post, showing $2.7 billion paid out, out of $3.0 billion obligated under the initial NextStep-2 contract in 2021 (those are clearly rounded figures).
I know it seems hard to believe that so much has been paid out. But that was the way NASA structured it.
I agree that Elon is actually unlikely to walk away, But he sure does sound fed up right now. Some of his ultimate course of action may depend on who gets picked to fill the NASA job.
By the way, for those curious, here is the USA Spending page for the Blue Origin HLS contract, showing its milestone payments, too:
https://www.usaspending.gov/award/CONT_AWD_80MSFC23CA014_8000_-NONE-_-NONE-
It appears that they have been paid $835 million in milestone payments so far.
Richard M: Thank you. These numbers are incredible, and once again indicate the utter delusional nature of the people running things in DC.
Yeah, it’s strange, isn’t it? You’d think you’d at least save a hefty milestone payment for the actual *landing*, wouldn’t you?
Then again, there is an element of unreality to the whole thing simply given that it was a known premise that Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos were going to be footing the bill for most of the cost of each of these landing systems ANYWAY. Indeed, it was a feature, because otherwise, NASA simply could not afford to obtain a lander with the funding Congress provided them (which was less than a third of what Bridenstine requested).
What *would* a lunar lander procured on traditional cost-plus contracts have cost NASA, given the architecture requirements? There was an interesting exchange between Eric Berger and Robotbeat (good guy to follow) the other day about this very question — someone has worked up a calculus for that. $25-26 billion, which is not far off what I’ve been guessing . . . though of course, one should add on some margin for the inevitable schedule delays. Probably over $30 billion when all is said and done, I suspect.
https://x.com/Robotbeat/status/1980276393612100088
NASA is only paying a small fraction of that for TWO landing systems. And yet, here’s everyone inside the Beltway whining because these tremendously ambitious landing systems are running into some development delays, and by gosh we can’t let the Chinese get there first.
To Richard M
“But again, Starship is still deep in development. It’s not remotely ready to carry crew yet. No one pretends otherwise.”
There are only so many times Starship apologists can hide behind that argument—this is where “Elon Time” and over-promising things comes home to roost. This last outing was impressive–but weren’t we all expecting that much earlier?
Despite damages, New Glenn and SLS (real rockets I can them) are set to launch real missions.
China, for some reason, wants to copy Elon.
As a concept, Kistler (the two-stage trash-can–not the bed-post design) seems much easier to implement. Parachutes and airbags–no hoverslams.
But China always wants what we have–and so instead of having one SpaceX—they want several…thinking that one of the heads will have Elon’s gifts. They find that person…who knows?
Jeff Wright wrote: “There are only so many times Starship apologists can hide behind that argument—this is where ‘Elon Time’ and over-promising things comes home to roost. This last outing was impressive–but weren’t we all expecting that much earlier?”
The number of times to “hide” behind that argument is the number of times it takes to make the rocket operational, fully reusable with rapid turnaround time and more capacity than either New Glenn or SLS — or any other rocket ever made, for that matter.
We were also expecting New Glenn and SLS much earlier, too. For SLS it was a decade ago, before Starship was even announced, where SLS uses existing hardware and Starship started from scratch.
SLS’s turnaround time between first and second launches makes New Glenn’s turnaround time seem instantaneous. Weren’t we all expecting Artemis 2 much earlier? “NASA Time” makes Elon Time seem instantaneous, too.
Come to think of it, we don’t know whether Orion is ready for a crew, either, but NASA is planning to test it — uncertified and with a known-to-be faulty heat shield — with a real crew, not in low Earth orbit like Apollo 7 (or Crew Dragon, or Starliner, or Gemini, or even the Space Shuttle) but in cislunar orbit like the certified Apollo 8 spacecraft.
Some people have infinite patience for their favored yet obsolete rocket (obsolete by Saturn V standards, half a century ago) but no patience for the rocket that breaks the boundaries of what we considered to be reality a mere decade ago (when SLS was supposed to launch).
“Despite damages, New Glenn and SLS (real rockets I can them) are set to launch real missions.”
And how many decades have they been in development and what is their turnaround time for reuse?
“China, for some reason, wants to copy Elon.”
Imagine that! Someone wants to emulate amazing success. I wonder why they don’t what to copy SLS.
“As a concept, Kistler (the two-stage trash-can–not the bed-post design) seems much easier to implement. Parachutes and airbags–no hoverslams.”
Everything is much easier when it is expendable instead of reusable. e.g. Kleenex® vs. handkerchief: one-use then throw it away vs. use it, store it, wash it, iron it, fold it back into your pocket.
Has anyone ever tested a skip style entry.
pzatchok: If I understand correctly what you mean by a “skip style entry,” all the Apollo missions returning from the Moon did this, hitting the top of the atmosphere once, skipping off, and then slipping back in to return to Earth. This was done to slow the vehicle down, since it was coming back at much higher speeds (25,000 mph) compared to orbital craft (17,000 mph).
Similarly aero-braking (using the atmosphere as a brake) has also been done by Mars Orbiters, as well as by the X-37B in Earth orbit.
Then why were they taking about the higher speeds of re-entry from the new moon orbiters.
Couldn’t they just do what Apollo did?
Or use a little more fuel and take a few extra orbits around the earth to slow down.
The way they were talking was that anything coming back from the moon is coming is with no way to slow down and the vehicle could punch through the atmosphere so fast the parachutes might not work.
Its like they took everything from Apollo and tossed it out a window.
pzatchok: They are not returning at higher speeds than Apollo. And they were always going to do the skip maneuver with Orion. They have just modified it somewhat to protect the heat shield.
The problem is simply they are using a questionable heat shield design with an untested flight profile and doing it with humans on board. The problem is the heat shield itself, not the speed of return.
Hello Jeff,
“China, for some reason, wants to copy Elon.”
Given that Elon’s company is literally launching 90% of all payload mass to orbit, globally, a majority of all humans to orbit, and now operates 7 out of 10 satellites active in Earth orbit, it’s not so hard to why the Chinese might see him as worthy of emulation.
Robert Zimmerman wrote: “all the Apollo missions returning from the Moon did this, hitting the top of the atmosphere once, skipping off, and then slipping back in to return to Earth.”
My understanding is that the “skip” was that the capsule came in somewhat low in the atmosphere, then went higher than it had been but never went above the “entry interface” altitude. After it reached that second high point, the capsule then went deeper and deeper into the atmosphere until parachute deployment and splashdown.
A recent paper
https://arc.aiaa.org/doi/10.2514/1.A36488
The heat shield isn’t the only problem. Casey Handmer wrote a detailed post about all the problems with Orion, as well as discussing why it’s so expensive.
https://caseyhandmer.wordpress.com/2025/10/31/nasas-orion-space-capsule-is-flaming-garbage/