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Expand/ The Orion spacecraft designated for the Artemis II mission was placed into a vacuum testing chamber at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida on April 4, 2024. (credit: NASA/Amanda Stevenson)
NASA aims to initiate the assembly of the Space Launch System (SLS) rocket for the groundbreaking Artemis II mission—marking humankind’s return to lunar exploration after over five decades—next month. However, the head of exploration at NASA has indicated that this schedule might be prone to delays as engineers are thoroughly assessing the integrity of Orion’s heat shield.
This crucial heat shield, already affixed to Orion’s base, is designed to endure extreme temperatures when the capsule re-enters Earth’s atmosphere following its ten-day journey. In late 2022, during the previous test flight known as Artemis I—which successfully took an uncrewed Orion spacecraft around the Moon and back—the only notable issue arose from its heat shield performance. During reentry conditions reaching nearly 5,000° Fahrenheit (approximately 2,760° Celsius), some sections of heat shield material were unexpectedly lost.
Though astronauts would have emerged unscathed had they been aboard during that test flight given its overall success with a safe splashdown recovery, investigations revealed troubling data about missing fragments from additional inspections conducted on the returned craft. The Avcoat material used for arming against excessive heat is intended to deplete via controlled erosion; however, it instead exhibited unexpected breakdown resulting in large cavities akin to potholes rather than mere surface wear.
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