It’s been almost a year since the unmanned spacecraft Orion crashed into the Pacific Ocean, and NASA expects it will take months to resolve the issue. Problems remaining with capsule heat shield before the crew gets on board.
NASA officials said in a recent meeting that the space agency will not proceed with the launch of the Artemis 2 mission until they understand the heat shield issue and make changes, Space News report.
NASA is still studying the performance of the Orion spacecraft’s heat shield, which could take several more months to complete, said Jim Free, deputy administrator for NASA’s Exploration Systems Development Mission Directorate.
The space agency is open to replacing heat shields and reversing some of the spacecraft’s hardware advances to resolve the issue, but for now the spacecraft will launch as is. Preparations are continuing. “We’re still working on the hardware because we don’t see any reason to stop right now,” Free said. “I’ll stop when I find a reason to stop.”
Artemis 2 is scheduled to launch in November 2024. Unlike Artemis 1, the next mission will have a crew on board. The spacecraft’s heat shield is designed to protect astronauts from the extremely high temperatures during Earth re-entry.
A follow-up survey of the capsule after the Artemis 1 mission revealed that Unexpected performance with heat shield. During Orion’s re-entry into Earth’s atmosphere, the spacecraft traveled at speeds reaching 24,600 miles per hour (39,590 kilometers per hour) and its heat shield withstood temperatures of more than 5,000 degrees Fahrenheit. Although NASA engineers expected some charring, more of the shield’s ablation material flaked off than expected.
“Some of the charred material disappeared in a manner different from what our computer models and ground tests predicted,” NASA’s Orion program manager Howard Hu told reporters in March. Ta. “More of this charred material was released during atmospheric reentry than we expected.”
At the time, NASA began research to learn more about the performance of heat shields during atmospheric reentry. Lakisha Hawkins, deputy deputy administrator for NASA’s Lunar and Mars Program Office, said at the conference that the space agency expects to have an “interim root cause resolution” for heat shield erosion late next spring. She added: “We’re going to make sure we’re all satisfied with the root cause situation before we start talking about the rationale for the flight.”
NASA continues to develop the spacecraft’s hardware in preparation for Artemis 2, in hopes of putting the mission into orbit for launch in 2024. “The processing of vehicles for Artemis 2 continues, but we’re just doing it to manage the schedule,” Hawkins was quoted as saying by Space News. “If we need to go back, if we need to go back as far as replacing the heat shield components, we’re totally open to that.”
It is not yet clear whether the heat shield will affect Artemis 2’s launch date, but crew members have made it clear that they will not board Orion unless the heat shield is resolved. At a press conference in August, NASA astronaut Reed Wiseman, the Artemis 2 mission commander, told Freeh: And we’re going to keep the pressure on.”
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