WASHINGTON — A report by NASA’s inspector general has disclosed new details about problems with the Orion spacecraft’s heat shield and other issues that delayed its first crewed launch.
The May 1 report by the NASA Office of Inspector General (OIG) reviewed problems with the Orion spacecraft, as well as ground equipment and the Deep Space Network, from the uncrewed Artemis 1 mission launched in late 2022.
One of the biggest issues was with the Orion heat shield. NASA disclosed months after the flight that more of the ablative heat shield material had been lost during reentry than expected, but added that it has not posed a safety risk to the spacecraft. NASA is still examining what happened to the heat shield, and that was one of three issues that led the agency in January to delay the Artemis 2 mission from late 2024 to no earlier than September 2025.
According to the OIG report, NASA found more than 100 locations on the heat shield where material “chipped away unexpectedly” during the Artemis 1 reentry. The report included images showing pockmarked portions of the heat shield that had not previously been released by the agency.
The heat shield material, known as Avcoat, “wore away differently than NASA engineers predicted, cracking and breaking off the spacecraft in fragments that created a trail of debris rather than melting away as designed,” the report stated. “The unexpected behavior of the Avcoat 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.”
NASA has yet to find a root cause for the behavior of the heat shield material. In a response accompanying the report, Cathy Koerner, NASA associate administrator of exploration systems development, stated that ground testing “successfully recreated…
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