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.
Ouch. That’s a significant indictment of the justification for going forward. Reminds me of Feynman’s discussion of NASA’s issues after Challenger. Has the agency really learned anything? Has Carmada been able to get Isaacman’s ear?
I wonder if a Dragon could do the mission?
All it really needs is a larger service trunk. Could a Falcon heavy lift enough?
pzatchok wonders if a Dragon could do the mission.
No. Not certified to operate in space unattached to ISS for more than a short period of time. Not large enough. It isn’t designed to take the thermal stress at the high speeds coming back from the Moon.
It isn’t designed to fly on SLS. Nor is it integrated with the European service module.
Life isn’t Star Trek, where Data can reel off some instantaneous easy solution and Captain Picard can wave his hand and say “Make it so.” This is engineering of the highest sort. You can’t slap it together and expect it to work.
Robert Zimmerman: my understanding is that the heatshield is capable of taking lunar reentry speeds, but there are issues with navigation and communication, and there’d be enough work otherwise that SpaceX may as well continue pushing forward with Starship rather than upgrade Dragon.
The SLS and ESM bits are, of course, insuperabe, though I am entertained by the idea of an SLS throwing a Dragon capsule into space.
Nate,
“Has Carmada been able to get Isaacman’s ear?”
As I commented in Bob’s new post thread on Camarda, Charlie says he wrote up a 60 page report, and he is holding off making it public until Isaacman reads it. I guess we must wait to see what happens.
Bob says:
This is all true, of course.
Now, it is also the case that there are some credible proposals out there to work Crew Dragon into all-SpaceX lunar architectures, and the most compelling of these just use Dragon for launch and EDL, never leaving Earth orbit, with Starship(s) in some form providing the transport for everything to and from the Moon. Even in this scenario, Dragon would still need to be modified for a longer loiter period, i.e., at least a few weeks, and that means upgrading power and life support intrinsically or having it dock to a power module of some kind while waiting quiescently in earth orbit for a lunar crew to return. It also means having to come up with a crewed Starship that is capable of coming back into Earth orbit, either retropropulsively or through aerobreaking. This is all quite doable, of course, though it is work that would have to be done . . . and, I suspect, will be done at some point.
The longer long-term option is more likely to just use Starship for everything.
Richard M,
Thank you for the post from Dr. Camarda.
Even before you noted that Camarda was not as satisfied as Eric Berger’s article suggested, I agreed with Camarda, or what, at the end of Berger’s article, was reported that he said. I am not as satisfied with what I read in Berger’s article, for similar reasons as Camarda stated in the linked X-tweet(?). Here is what I was already writing, before I read your comment and Camarda’s response to the article:
From the ArsTechnica article:
The heavily redacted report did not reassure. Hiding the damage for more than a year, only to have it outed by an oversight team was bad enough, but the opaque, heavily redacted (I think that the title was not blacked out, and maybe the page numbers, too) report raises further doubts. What was in that report that NASA didn’t want exposed? Without that report I remain concerned that Isaacman was influenced in his decision and has authorized the mission for political reasons, not safety reasons. We already know from his confirmation hearings that he is willing to continue Artemis just so that Ted Cruz’s daughters can say that their generation has been to the Moon, like our generation can claim, but that will happen in a few years anyway. SpaceX has expressed an interest in mining lunar material via a lunar base (Moon Base Alpha?) for economic use in space.
SpaceX is known for making the impossible happen, so the difficult is just another task for a team to accomplish. We should not be racing the Chinese to the Moon for a goal we have already reached — which is why the American public is not nearly as excited about Artemis as it was about Apollo. We should be racing China to the Moon for the goal of lunar prospecting, mining, and manufacturing via a permanent base, rather than the temporary Flags and Footprints stay that both the Chinese and Artemis III and IV will do in the next few years. We should be creating an economy in Earth orbit and in the lunar regions of space, not doing stunts that were once challenges.
So, do we get to see some of that, especially the relevant charts and data? That would be transparency.
That is good news, but what about the material under the base material? What about the temperatures inside the capsule? Wouldn’t a real-life test of a simulated failure under actual reentry be a better holistic test of the whole system?
Thus the concern. We do not know what happens to the entire heat shield under real conditions. We have an idea of what happens in the lab. We fly test flights to learn the actual behavior of the whole system under actual fight conditions. What really happens during flight or reentry that the agency’s modeling, calculations, and analysis have not predicted? We were surprised last time, and we really, really don’t want to be surprised on a manned mission.
In the 1950s, several test pilots died testing airplanes under conditions that everyone thought would be survivable, otherwise they would not have performed those tests with live pilots. They were not suicide missions, but due to a lack of knowledge of reality, test pilots died.
We still only have models and laboratory tests to assure us that these astronauts are safe, not real world tests.
The assumption being that the unexpected damage happened late in the reentry?
Ooh! There’s that word: assumption. That is a bad word, when you are trying to understand the behavior of materials, or of anything. We cannot avoid assumptions during analysis, modeling, or calculations, but real-life tests with actual flight hardware under real world conditions put the assumptions to bed.
And the engineers are convinced? Weren’t they convinced that the heat shield was safe under the previous reentry conditions? Didn’t they do modeling, testing, and analysis for that reentry angle, too? Why is this analysis better than the Artemis I analysis? Why was that earlier independent review team’s report heavily redacted, and why have we not yet seen it un-redacted?
Well, that answer is more frightening than reassuring. Hints were not investigated. Hints that the material did not behave as designed or intended. It is now clear that the 2019 test was not adequate to reveal the problem, and none of the other tests came as close as that test to reveal the problem. Artemis I testing was not similar enough to the reality to give correct answers. Can ground testing be sufficient? We could be much closer to being sure with actual flight tests.
They were just as confident with Artemis I, though. Right?
And, now we are back to schedule as the flight rationale.
Well, it sounds like Challenger all over again. They knew that there was a problem, some of the engineers (at Thiokol) pretended and reported that it was not a big problem. Then they couldn’t convince NASA that it really was a big problem. (Actually, when NASA asked which it was, a big problem or not, Thiokol back down and reiterated that it was not a big problem after all.) A workaround for a problem needs to be flight tested before a crew is flown on board. We can pretend that the workaround works, but how do we know until it is flight tested?
As with Challenger, there is no guarantee of failure or of catastrophe, but the possibility is there and it is higher than we should expect for a NASA mission. NASA may be playing dice with the universe. Again.
Isaacman may be reassured, but this article has not reassured me about the safety of Artemis II.
I agree with Camarda. NASA should get back to doing research. I also think that NASA should work more like the NACA, doing research and helping U.S. companies test their designs and ideas. We now have a large number of U.S. companies trying new launch ideas as well as other companies trying new spaceflight mission ideas. Most of them do not have the resources to truly test their ideas, and that was one of the purposes of the NACA.
Trump had no say in 2023. I reckon he’s not going to undermine Issacman, either. A quibble, in the overall context, perhaps, but if we’re going to be slinging around blame, well.
Robert observed:”Personally, I think SLS was obsolete 20 years ago. It is simply a poor man’s version of a Saturn-5 . . .”
Not for what it cost.