NASA says the Artemis 2 Orion crew capsule is ready to come home after flying around the moon, with the four astronauts aboard expected to hit the discernible atmosphere about 75 miles above the Pacific Ocean and scream through re-entry at 24,000 mph.
As the capsule drops back toward Earth, temperatures across its 16.5-foot-wide heat shield are expected to climb to about 5,000 degrees while the spacecraft slows in an electrically charged fireball of atmospheric friction before parachutes carry it to a Pacific splashdown.
Amit Kshatriya said Thursday that NASA has high confidence in the heat shield, the parachutes and the recovery systems built for the mission. “The engineering supports it, the Artemis 1 flight data supports it. All of our ground tests support it, our analysis supports it and tomorrow, the crew is going to put their lives behind that confidence,” he said.
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The crew — Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, Christina Koch and Jeremy Hansen — is stepping into a return profile that NASA changed after Artemis 1, the unpiloted 2022 test flight, came back with heat shield damage. Engineers found sub-surface cracks and gas pockets in the Avcoat shield that blew away pieces of the outer char layer, and they concluded the most likely cause was that the material was not permeable enough during a specific phase of re-entry.
That finding forced NASA to order a different heat shield design for later Artemis missions. But Artemis 2 already had the shield installed, and replacing it with a new one would have pushed the mission back by 18 months or more. Instead, NASA opted to launch Artemis 2 as is after analysis showed the modified re-entry trajectory would work properly.
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Wiseman said the team’s review left him confident in the plan. “They did a tremendous amount of research, a lot of groundbreaking research in some facilities that we had not used before, and they discovered the root cause,” he said. “They did wind tunnel testing and laser testing and hyper-velocity testing, and they determined that if we come in with this lofted profile … that this heat shield will be safe for us to go fly.”
He added, “So I think all that points in the direction of goodness,” and said that if a person sat through the same meetings and heard the same experts walk through the data, “you would have the same comfort.”
The change to the re-entry path is the key difference from Artemis 1, which followed a planned skip trajectory that helped reduce the spacecraft’s velocity. NASA says the revised profile for Artemis 2 is meant to avoid the temperature and pressure swings that helped damage the earlier shield, but the capsule still has to survive one of the hardest parts of human spaceflight before anyone can say the fix worked.
The return now carries more than technical weight. If the capsule comes through as expected, it will validate the agency’s decision to fly Artemis 2 without a replacement shield and clear the way for the next phase of the lunar program. If it does not, the consequences will land long after the parachutes do.
