NASA’s lunar rocket is surrounded by safety concerns

NASA is nearing the final preparations for its first crewed moon mission since the Apollo era, but the mode of transportation has some experts worried. The agency’s Artemis II mission, which will take astronauts on a flyby of the moon, is set to launch in the coming months aboard the Orion spacecraft. But concerns over a key element of the vehicle has led to calls to hold off on the mission.

What are the primary safety concerns?

The main issue is related to the Orion’s heat shield. This is a coating along the bottom of the spacecraft that protects the vehicle from extreme temperatures upon reentering Earth’s atmosphere. The Orion’s heat shield for Artemis II is “nearly identical” to the heat shield used for the uncrewed Artemis I mission, and “that prior mission’s Orion vehicle returned from space with a heat shield pockmarked by unexpected damage,” said CNN.

NASA hired an independent agency to investigate why the heat shield was damaged. The report was largely redacted but concluded that the heat shield became charred in large pieces, a phenomenon it was “not designed nor was it expected” to protect the spacecraft from. Using this investigation, NASA “identified the technical cause of unexpected char loss across the Artemis I Orion spacecraft,” the agency said in a press release.

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Despite these findings, NASA plans to forge ahead with Artemis II using the same heat shield. Instead of “making major material changes to the heat shield itself after the fact,” NASA “opted to adjust the Artemis II mission’s flight path instead, to ensure a gentler reentry,” said Futurism. This has some experts concerned. NASA has a “deviant heat shield,” Dr. Danny Olivas, a former NASA astronaut who served on the independent review board, said to CNN. “There’s no doubt about it: This is not the heat shield that NASA would want to give its astronauts.”

What next?

The Artemis II flight will mark a major moment for NASA, as it will be the “first time humans have traveled beyond low Earth orbit in more than 50 years,” said ABC News. But unlike the later Apollo missions, Artemis II will not land on the moon; it will be a test flight around the lunar body ahead of Artemis III, which “aims to someday land astronauts near the moon’s South Pole, a region never explored by humans.”

Ahead of the planned mission, NASA has “full confidence” in the Orion’s heat shield, NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman told reporters. The agency trusts the “Orion spacecraft and its heat shield, grounded in rigorous analysis and the work of exceptional engineers who followed the data throughout the process.” But this has not stopped others from voicing their concerns.

NASA “made a huge mistake with the approach to manufacturing the heat shield, as I pointed out since the return of the first Artemis I Orion capsule nearly a year and a half ago,” Dr. Ed Pope, an expert on heat shield technology, said on his Linkedin page after the investigation. “It’ll now take too long, cost too much and cause too great of a delay if they fix it. Enter the bureaucrats and politicians to make the final call. Expediency won over safety and good materials science and engineering. Sad day for NASA.”