Artemis II is not safe to fly

I haven't kept up with Artemis development but I've read extensively about Challenger and Columbia. These two parts of the article stood out to me:

> Moon-to-Mars Deputy Administrator Amit Kshatriya said: “it was very small localized areas. Interestingly, it would be much easier for us to analyze if we had larger chunks and it was more defined”. A Lockheed Martin representative on the same call added that "there was a healthy margin remaining of that virgin Avcoat. So it wasn’t like there were large, large chunks.”

Followed by:

> The Avcoat material is not designed to come out in chunks. It is supposed to char and flake off smoothly, maintaining the overall contours of the heat shield.

This is echoes both Shuttle incidents. Challenger: no gasses were supposed to make it past the o-rings no matter what, but when it became clear that gasses were escaping and the o-rings were being damaged, there was a push to suggest that it's an acceptable level.

There was a similar situation with heat shield damage and Columbia.

In both cases some models were used to justify the decision, with wild extrapolations and fundamentally, a design that wasn't expected to fail in that mode /at all/.

I know the points that astronauts make about the importance of manned space exploration, but I agree with this author that it seems to make sense to run this as an unmanned mission, and probably test the new heat shield which will replace the Artemis II design in an unmanned re-entry as well.

This is a more balanced take, in my opinion:

https://arstechnica.com/space/2026/01/nasa-chief-reviews-ori...

Camarda is an outlier. The engineers at NASA believe it is safe. The astronauts believe it is safe. Former astronaut Danny Olivas was initially skeptical of the heat shield but came around.

And note that the OP believes it is likely (maybe very likely) that the heat shield will work fine. It's hard for me to reconcile "It is likely that Artemis II will land safely" with "Artemis II is Not Safe to Fly", unless maybe getting clicks is involved.

Regardless, this is not a Challenger or Columbia situation. In both Challenger and Columbia, nobody bothered to analyze the problem because they didn't think there was a problem. That's the difference, in my opinion. NASA is taking this seriously and has analyzed the problem deeply.

They are not YOLO'ing this mission, and it's somewhat insulting that people think they are.

Someone please answer my obvious question. We sent successful missions to the moon sixty years ago. What heat shield material was used for the Apollo capsules, and why would we need something different now? Are the Artemis mission parameters totally different in a way that requires a new design? Or was Apollo incredibly dangerous and we got lucky they didn’t all fail catastrophically? The article mentions Orion is much heavier than the Apollo capsules, does that really require a totally novel heat shield that takes $billions to develop?

> “Our test facilities can’t reach the combination of heat flux, pressure, shear stresses, etc., that an actual reentering spacecraft does. We’re always having to wait for the flight test to get the final certification that our system is good to go.”—Jeremy VanderKam, deputy manager for Orion’s heat shield, speaking in 2022

This is a strange claim, considering NASA used to have 2 facilities that were capable of this - one at Johnson and one at Ames. They were consolidated (https://ntrs.nasa.gov/api/citations/20160001258/downloads/20...) but it seems like the Arc Jet Complex at Ames is still operational https://www.nasa.gov/ames/arcjet-complex/

Welcome back, Maciej!

This is a concerning read, I'm not quite sure what the driving motivation is for Artemis, but the following answered at least part of my question -

> That context is a moon program that has spent close to $100 billion and 25 years with nothing to show for itself, at an agency that has just experienced mass firings and been through a near-death experience with its science budget

I'm nowhere near qualified to say if the design is not safe, but I'm suprised the article doesn't mention that some heat shields are designed to indeed, blow chunks: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atmospheric_entry#Ablative

I am very not brave but I'd volunteer. The trip is far more awesome than anything I have planned for the rest of my life. And if the shield fails on reentry it would only hurt for a few seconds. So if the crew and the backups and their backups read this and have second thoughts, ping me.

mechanical engineering background here. the heat shield honeycomb → block change sounds like a classic cost/complexity tradeoff where you lose structural integrity for easier manufacturing.

reminds me of automotive safety recalls that trace back to "simplified" component designs. sometimes the old complex way was complex for a reason.

If you are serious about moon, there should be dozen of unmanned landers setting up the infrastructure before first human landers. There should be plenty of time to test human rated stuff multiple times. This is only problem because it's second mission and right with humans. If it was 24th and first human mission all these unknowns would be solved.

Ergo the mission design is wrong, not the heat shield design.

“…in early 2026, NASA decided to add an additional Artemis mission to the manifest. The new Artemis III would fly in 2027 as a near-Earth mission to test docking with whatever lunar lander (Blue Origin or SpaceX) was available. The first moon landing would be pushed back to the mission after that, Artemis IV. This change removed any rationale for flying astronauts on Artemis II.”

Is there truly no engineering or science merit to flying astronauts by the Moon?

The heatshield is not quite Avcoat. It is missing the crucial honeycomb that gives it structural integrity. I worked on EFT-1. It's test flight was gorgeous (2014). LM decided to remove the honeycomb. It is like a beehive with no honeycomb.

I changed projects bc it was obvious to that the risk was substantial, long befor Artemis was called Artemis, people said this.

Definitely concerned to hear but I’m hopeful that the core of nasa is intact. They’re some of the kindest and smartest people I’ve had the pleasure of meeting. They don’t joke around with lives on the line. I hope the best for everyone involved. I’ll be watching the launch of Artemis 2 and 3 with excitement and hope.

> Notice: Only variables should be passed by reference in /Users/maciej/Code/iw/site/month.php on line 8

if author is reading this, you should fix this maybe.

I wonder what the heat shield engineers actually think of this. It's my understanding that in the Challenger disaster, the engineers were aware of the problem and tried to do something about it, but management weren't having it

> The trouble is that the heat shield on Orion blows chunks. Not in some figurative, pejorative sense, but in the sense that when NASA flew this exact mission in 2022, large pieces of material blew out of Orion’s heat shield during re-entry, leaving divots. Large bolts embedded in the heat shield also partially eroded and melted through.

Fun wording. This isn't news, concerns have been raised about Artemis II saftey in the past 3+ years since Artemis I and before then as well.

The article seems compelling, but experience tells me to get both sides of a story before judging.

Anyone know if there's a detailed response from NASA to the article?

Maciej now has a Mars newsletter, which I obviously subscribed to immediately: https://mceglowski.substack.com/

I didn’t even have a strong interest in space before the dude started writing about it. Maciej could write about literal rocks and make it worthwhile to read.

To some extent I think since the challenger disaster trying to blow the whistle on safety issues at NASA has been romantacized.

For me, so long as the information is transparently discussed with the astronauts they can agree or disagree. But the task is intrinsically extremely risky.

It makes it very challenging for anyone to really know how to balance those risks.

The peak outcome (modal, mean at least) is a good outcome. But the tail is very very long with all the little ways a catastrophe can occur. I think the median outcome is also deeply in the "good" category.

And we sample this curve a few times a decade!

Right or wrong about this, none of us can do much about it at this point. The die is cast. I guess we'll just wait and see.

Related: NASA's Orion Space Capsule Is Flaming Garbage by Casey Handmer https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45794242

Is Orion’s heat shield really safe? New NASA chief conducts final review on eve of flight. https://arstechnica.com/space/2026/01/nasa-chief-reviews-ori...

One thing I'm missing here, did the heat shield actually burn through on the earlier test or not?

I have a bad feeling about this project.

It reminds me of both the movies Capricorn 1 and Iron Sky ... and not in any good way.

I wouldn't be nearly so concerned if not for the blatant coverup and downplaying from NASA. This makes the whole situation easily pattern match to Apollo 1, Challenger and Columbia, where political pressure to ignore problems and drive forward anyway got people needlessly killed.

NASA operates as a terminal, bloated monopoly that has completely severed its feedback loops with physical reality in favor of preserving a 25-year-old architectural fantasy. The Orion heat shield is essentially a buggy hardware release being pushed into a mission-critical production environment despite the fact that its own internal telemetry is screaming about a catastrophic failure. By choosing to ignore the spalling and the melted structural bolts, the agency is deliberately discarding the engineering equivalent of core dump data to maintain a schedule that satisfies political optics rather than Newtonian physics.

It's not actually Avcoat. It was changed by LM. Thw honeycomb was removed. Imagine a beehive with no honeycomb and a slop of honey is what you have. Crystallized/solid honey, but honey never the less.

That we are still using Avcoat is just silly. Pica is so much better. It really shows this design is literally from the 90s. Orian is one of those continual dumbster fire programs that literally only exists to make congress happy. It survived literally years without any reasonable mission at all. NASA had to make up missions for it to do.

Orian is everything erong with US technology development and procurment.

What I don't get is why the heck are the astronauts willing to risk their lives on something they must know by now is so dangerous? Is it really better to risk death than to risk getting fired?

The author seems to have a pretty extensive history of… strong disdain for Artemis II. While has mentioned concerns about the heat shield before it was in the context of a laundry list of complaints, and it was nowhere close to the top.

I’m not a rocket scientist, but then neither is the author.

> That context is a moon program that has spent close to $100 billion and 25 years with nothing to show for itself, at an agency that has just experienced mass firings and been through a near-death experience with its science budget. The charismatic new Administrator has staked his reputation on increasing launch cadence, and set an explicit goal of landing astronauts on the Moon before President Trump’s term expires in January of 2029.

This is the most frustrating part. The Pentagon can fail the same audit multiple times and be missing trillions of taxpayer dollars but NASA has to move heaven and earth to show their relatively paltry $100B budget isn't going to waste. I'm tired of the double standards.

> if a commercial crew capsule (SpaceX Dragon or Boeing Starliner) returned to Earth with the kind of damage seen on Orion, NASA would insist on a redesign and an unmanned test flight to validate it.

Are you sure about that?

https://spaceflightnow.com/2022/05/24/spacex-swapping-heat-s...

As someone who is actually (still) a fan of basic research, Artemis looks like a fun time for the 1% with a $100 billion dollar price tag, except that since it's only 4 astronauts and support staff, it's less than 1%. I opposed messing with NASA funding for a long time, but arguments referencing spin-off tech and so on wear thin. Spin-off occurring lately would/could only be captured by existing billionaires anyway, and without much benefit for society in general.

Humans in space are currently still a waste of time/money, largely just a big surrender to PR, space-selfies, the attention economy, and the general emphasis on "seem not be" you see elsewhere. Please just send robots, build a base, and let us know when we can put more than ~10 freaking people up there at one time. If that fails, then at least we'll have results in robotics research that can be applicable elsewhere on Earth right now as well as help us achieve the more grand ambitions later.

House is on fire, has been for a while, fuck business as usual. I honestly think all those smart people ought to be charged with things like using their operations research to improve government generally, or with larger-scale high tech job programs. If you don't want to let NASA big-brains try to fix healthcare, we could at least let them fix the DMV. Hell, let them keep their spin-offs too, so they actually want success, and have some part of their budget that won't disappear. Basic research and fundamental science is (still) something we need, but we need to be far more strategic about it.

Food for thought: The way things are going, we can definitely look forward to a NASA that's completely transformed into an informal, but publicly funded, research/telemetry arm for billionaire asteroid-mining operations, and thus more of the "public risk, private-profits" thing while we pad margins for people who are doing fine without the help. OTOH, if NASA is running asteroid mining businesses at huge profits, then they can do whatever they want with squishy volunteers as a sideshow, and maybe we'll have enough cash left over to fund basic income.

Great read and interesting article. Hard to believe that NASA would risk astronauts lives simply to save face, but that appears to be what's going to happen.

Can't they do a few loops around the planet and skim only the upper atmosphere? always worked well for me on kerbal space program, haha

I’d love to see a new law requiring the NASA Administrator (a political appointee) to be a member of the first crewed flight of a new program.