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.
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