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NASA plans to send people to the moon in a spacecraft some say isn’t safe
25th January, 2026 09:18 AM
When four astronauts begin a historic trip around the moon as early as February 6, they’ll climb aboard NASA’s 16.5-foot-wide Orion spacecraft with the understanding that it has a known flaw, one that has some experts urging the space agency not to fly the mission with humans on board.
But NASA remains confident it has a handle on the problem, and the vehicle can bring the crew home safely.
The issue concerns a special coating applied to the bottom of the spacecraft, called the heat shield. It’s a crucial piece of hardware designed to protect astronauts from extreme temperatures as they descend back to Earth during the final stretch of their moon-bound Artemis II mission.
This vital part of the Orion spacecraft is nearly identical to the heat shield flown on Artemis I, an uncrewed 2022 test flight. That prior mission’s Orion vehicle returned from space with a heat shield pockmarked by unexpected damage — prompting NASA to investigate the issue.
And while NASA is poised to clear the heat shield for flight, even those who believe the mission is safe acknowledge there is an unknown risk involved.
“This is a deviant heat shield,” said Dr Danny Olivas, a former NASA astronaut who served on a space agency-appointed independent review team that investigated the incident. “There’s no doubt about it: This is not the heat shield that NASA would want to give its astronauts.”
At the conclusion of the Artemis I test flight, the recovered Orion spacecraft was transported to Kennedy Space Centre, where its heat shield was removed and inspected. NASA
Still, Olivas said he believes after spending years analysing what went wrong with the heat shield, NASA “has its arms around the problem.”
Upon completing the investigation about a year ago, NASA determined it would fly the Artemis II Orion capsule as is, believing it could ensure the crew’s safety by slightly altering the mission’s flight path.
In a statement to CNN on Friday, NASA said the agency “considered all aspects” when making that decision, noting there is also “uncertainty that comes with the development and qualification of the processes of changing the manufacturing process of the Avcoat ablator blocks.”
Basically, NASA said, there’s uncertainty involved no matter which course of action it takes. Others aren’t so sure.
“What they’re talking about doing is crazy,” said Dr Charlie Camarda, a heat shield expert, research scientist and former NASA astronaut.
Camarda — who was also a member of the first space shuttle crew to launch after the 2003 Columbia disaster — is among a group of former NASA employees who do not believe that the space agency should put astronauts on board the upcoming lunar excursion. He said he has spent months trying to get agency leadership to heed his warnings to no avail.
“We could have solved this problem way back when,” Camarda, who worked as a NASA research scientist for two decades before becoming an astronaut, said of the heat shield issue. “Instead, they keep kicking the can down the road.”
Now, the agency appears on track to green-light Artemis II for takeoff, as its leaders have sought to assure the public — and the crew — the mission will be safe.
The Orion spacecraft was rolled to its launchpad atop the Space Launch System (SLS) rocket on January 17. And a crucial milestone could be days away as Artemis program leaders gather for final risk assessments and the flight readiness review, a meeting in which top brass will determine whether the Artemis II rocket and spacecraft are ready to take off with NASA’s Wiseman, Victor Glover and Christina Koch, and the Canadian Space Agency’s Jeremy Hansen, on board.
The Artemis II crew: Canadian Space Agency’s Jeremy Hansen and NASA’s Christina Koch, Victor Glover and Reid Wiseman, seen in November 2023. NASA
A consequential design change
Even before Artemis, the Orion capsule — a $20.4 billion spacecraft that NASA spent 20 years developing — was not exactly a darling of the aerospace community. Resentment for the vehicle has been brewing in various pockets of the industry for some time.
One engineer and physicist who previously worked on advanced technology development but did not work directly on the Artemis program derided Orion as “flaming garbage.” A former employee at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, he decried the capsule’s exceptionally long development timeline and cost overruns that have ballooned into the billions of dollars.
Lori Garver, a former deputy administrator for NASA under the Obama administration, has publicly lamented the politicking that colored the vehicle’s path to completion.
But Orion’s issues can’t be fully pinned on politics, said Dr Ed Pope, a heat shield and material science expert who founded Matech, a California-based missile defence technology company. Pope did not participate in NASA’s heat shield investigation.
“It’s not a Republican thing or a Democrat thing at all,” Pope told CNN. “It’s a bureaucrat thing.”
‘Yes, it’s going to crack’
Even some experts who believe Artemis II is safe to fly acknowledge that the Orion heat shield will likely crack and display signs of damage upon its return from Earth, even with the modified trajectory.
“Will the heat shield crack? Yes, it’s going to crack,” Olivas, the astronaut who aided NASA’s heat shield investigation, said.
But Orion has some built-in “robustness,” said Dr Steve Scotti, a distinguished research associate at NASA’s Langley Research Centre in Hampton, Virginia, who served as a volunteer on an advisory team that was involved in the Artemis I heat shield investigation.
