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More than a year after NASA’s Space Launch System (SLS) rocket took to the skies with the Orion spacecraft on board to start the Artemis 1 mission and the Artemis program, a report from the NASA inspector general’s office shares new images of ship’s heat shield. Soon after Orion landed on Earth, NASA revealed during a press conference that teams had discovered unexpected damage to the ship’s heat shield. This was followed up by a few updates, the latest of which came last week when, during a meeting, a NASA official shared that his agency was still working to determine the reasons behind the damage.
Fresh Images Of NASA’s Orion Heat Shield Shows Significant Damage & Cavities
The November 2022 Artemis 1 mission was a test flight that aimed to test Orion’s performance during lift-off, the trip to the Moon, the return to Earth and performance in the atmosphere. The ship met most of its test objectives, and managers kept a close eye on its heat shield during return. This was because the heat shield cannot be tested on Earth, and its performance could only be verified after it had endured the extreme temperatures that a ship faces during reentry.
After Orion’s return, NASA shared during a press conference that it was surprised by some of the findings on the heat shield. The shield uses a polymer resin called AVOCAT which is cut into smaller pieces and assembled on the ship’s bottom. It is designed to burn during reentry through a process called ablation, and NASA’s Orion program manager, Howard Hu, shared during the conference that instead of ablating, some pieces of the shield were “coming off” instead.
Now, fresh images of the Orion’s heat shield shared in a NASA OIG report show just how significant the damage was. In the images, the ship’s heat shield is charred black after withstanding the significant stressors of re entry. While this is nominal, as the shields of other ships, such as SpaceX’s Dragon, are also similarly charred, the images for Orion also show at least four cavities on the shield.
According to the OIG, NASA engineers have determined that the cavities are due to the upper layer of the heat shield “breaking off the spacecraft in fragments that created a trail of debris rather than melting away as designed.” This layer is expected to uniformly burn off during reentry, and the OIG warns that the presence of cavities “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.”
It adds that the size of the cavities and the trail of debris could also damage the ship’s parachutes and lead to a catastrophic loss of mission. Engineers are now also evaluating whether Orion’s trajectory or the shield’s design can be changed to avoid the cavities in the future, and while they have been able to “recreate the char loss“, other flight conditions have not been simulated on Earth, according to the report.
NASA’s associate administrator for human exploration systems development, Catherine Koerner, also weighed in on the OIG’s report. According to her:
NASA is dedicated to continuous improvement of our processes and procedures to ensure safety and address potential risks and deficiencies. However, the redundancy in the above recommendations does not help to ensure whether NASA’s programs are organized, managed, and implemented economically, effectively, and efficiently.
The Artemis 1 mission is scheduled to be followed by Artemis 2 next year. Artemis 2 is planned to mark the first time humans make their way around the Moon since the Apollo program, and the impact of these heat shield deviations on the mission’s schedule is unclear.
