Artemis II is not safe to fly

I'm literally guest lecturing at a Harvard class tomorrow on systemic failures in decision making, using the Columbia and Challenger disasters as case studies, and changed my slides last night to include Artemis II because it could literally happen again.

This broken safety culture has been around since the beginning of the Shuttle program.

In 1980, Gregg Easterbrook published "Goodbye, Columbia" in The Washington Monthly [1], warning that NASA's "success-oriented planning" and political pressure were creating the conditions for catastrophe. He essentially predicted Columbia's heat shield failures in the article 1 year before the first flight.

Challenger in 1986, and the Rogers Commission identified hierarchy, communication failures, and management overriding engineering judgment.

Then Columbia happened in 2003. The CAIB found NASA had not implemented the 1986 recommendations [2].

Now Charles Camarda (who flew the first shuttle mission after Columbia and is literally a heat shield expert!) is saying it's happening again.

[1] https://www.iasa-intl.com/folders/shuttle/GoodbyeColumbia.ht...

[2] Columbia Accident Investigation Board Report, Chapter 8: https://www.nasa.gov/columbia/caib/html/start.html

I haven't kept up with Artemis development but I've read extensively about Challenger and Columbia. These two parts of the article stood out to me:

> Moon-to-Mars Deputy Administrator Amit Kshatriya said: “it was very small localized areas. Interestingly, it would be much easier for us to analyze if we had larger chunks and it was more defined”. A Lockheed Martin representative on the same call added that "there was a healthy margin remaining of that virgin Avcoat. So it wasn’t like there were large, large chunks.”

Followed by:

> The Avcoat material is not designed to come out in chunks. It is supposed to char and flake off smoothly, maintaining the overall contours of the heat shield.

This is echoes both Shuttle incidents. Challenger: no gasses were supposed to make it past the o-rings no matter what, but when it became clear that gasses were escaping and the o-rings were being damaged, there was a push to suggest that it's an acceptable level.

There was a similar situation with heat shield damage and Columbia.

In both cases some models were used to justify the decision, with wild extrapolations and fundamentally, a design that wasn't expected to fail in that mode /at all/.

I know the points that astronauts make about the importance of manned space exploration, but I agree with this author that it seems to make sense to run this as an unmanned mission, and probably test the new heat shield which will replace the Artemis II design in an unmanned re-entry as well.

This is a more balanced take, in my opinion:

https://arstechnica.com/space/2026/01/nasa-chief-reviews-ori...

Camarda is an outlier. The engineers at NASA believe it is safe. The astronauts believe it is safe. Former astronaut Danny Olivas was initially skeptical of the heat shield but came around.

And note that the OP believes it is likely (maybe very likely) that the heat shield will work fine. It's hard for me to reconcile "It is likely that Artemis II will land safely" with "Artemis II is Not Safe to Fly", unless maybe getting clicks is involved.

Regardless, this is not a Challenger or Columbia situation. In both Challenger and Columbia, nobody bothered to analyze the problem because they didn't think there was a problem. That's the difference, in my opinion. NASA is taking this seriously and has analyzed the problem deeply.

They are not YOLO'ing this mission, and it's somewhat insulting that people think they are.

Someone please answer my obvious question. We sent successful missions to the moon sixty years ago. What heat shield material was used for the Apollo capsules, and why would we need something different now? Are the Artemis mission parameters totally different in a way that requires a new design? Or was Apollo incredibly dangerous and we got lucky they didn’t all fail catastrophically? The article mentions Orion is much heavier than the Apollo capsules, does that really require a totally novel heat shield that takes $billions to develop?

> “Our test facilities can’t reach the combination of heat flux, pressure, shear stresses, etc., that an actual reentering spacecraft does. We’re always having to wait for the flight test to get the final certification that our system is good to go.”—Jeremy VanderKam, deputy manager for Orion’s heat shield, speaking in 2022

This is a strange claim, considering NASA used to have 2 facilities that were capable of this - one at Johnson and one at Ames. They were consolidated (https://ntrs.nasa.gov/api/citations/20160001258/downloads/20...) but it seems like the Arc Jet Complex at Ames is still operational https://www.nasa.gov/ames/arcjet-complex/

This is a concerning read, I'm not quite sure what the driving motivation is for Artemis, but the following answered at least part of my question -

> That context is a moon program that has spent close to $100 billion and 25 years with nothing to show for itself, at an agency that has just experienced mass firings and been through a near-death experience with its science budget

I am very not brave but I'd volunteer. The trip is far more awesome than anything I have planned for the rest of my life. And if the shield fails on reentry it would only hurt for a few seconds. So if the crew and the backups and their backups read this and have second thoughts, ping me.

Data points that worry me:

02/1967 - Apollo 1 fire

01/1986 - Challenger disaster (19 yrs later)

02/2003 - Columbia disaster (17 yrs later)

It's been 23 years since Columbia, and there seems to be a 20-ish year rhythm to NASA disasters where the organization learns lessons, becomes more careful... and then standards potentially slip.

> This will be second flight of NASA’s SLS rocket, and the first time the 20-year-old Orion capsule flies with people on board.

THEY REUSE THESE CAPSULES?!

If you are serious about moon, there should be dozen of unmanned landers setting up the infrastructure before first human landers. There should be plenty of time to test human rated stuff multiple times. This is only problem because it's second mission and right with humans. If it was 24th and first human mission all these unknowns would be solved.

Ergo the mission design is wrong, not the heat shield design.

The heatshield is not quite Avcoat. It is missing the crucial honeycomb that gives it structural integrity. I worked on EFT-1. It's test flight was gorgeous (2014). LM decided to remove the honeycomb. It is like a beehive with no honeycomb.

I changed projects bc it was obvious to that the risk was substantial, long befor Artemis was called Artemis, people said this.

A lot of the discussion overlooks or wishes to avoid an uncomfortable problem with the Artemis program: Artemis III's hardware will not be ready for the forseeable future. The program has had multiple shakeups so far. This is a program heading for cancellation.

The flight risk is surely acceptable if this is not the first flight of many but the last.

I have no takes on Artemis, but just wanted to say how happy I am for another post from idlewords. Some of my most favorite articles on the internet are on that site.

I expect there are a dozen equally possible to occur catastrophic failures that the team at NASA knows about, has analyzed, and the decision has been made to take the risk and launch.

Spaceflight is complicated. We don't know everything. There is a lot of unknowns that happen everytime you light off a rocket.

It is a lot easier for Elon, as the loss is only a pile of money.

Without ever working at NASA, I expect there is a week long "risk management prior to launch" meeting where many, many issues are brought up, discussed, and decided.

> The trouble is that the heat shield on Orion blows chunks. Not in some figurative, pejorative sense, but in the sense that when NASA flew this exact mission in 2022, large pieces of material blew out of Orion’s heat shield during re-entry, leaving divots. Large bolts embedded in the heat shield also partially eroded and melted through.

Fun wording. This isn't news, concerns have been raised about Artemis II saftey in the past 3+ years since Artemis I and before then as well.

I would like to understand why it happens so often to organizations that a currupted and dyfunctional behaviour takes over. And it seems to happen more often to institutions run by governments.

Examples could be the Challenger disaster where managers overruled the engineers (who said in a meeting a launch was too dangerous) or the Boing 737max. Also a lot of companies in germany that I experienced (as employee and as consultant) seem similiar.

One reason could be (and I saw that myself) is that there can be a situation where the best employees start leaving. It's likely natural since they can find something else easier than the others.

The article seems compelling, but experience tells me to get both sides of a story before judging.

Anyone know if there's a detailed response from NASA to the article?

I read something about the Challenger disaster being predicted by an engineer and they wrote a memo about the risk because they were worried about it, but it didn't get through. I wondered if this was the only memo ever about risks to the space shuttle, or if it was one of hundreds and it just got the actual cause by luck.

Does anyone know any more about this?

mechanical engineering background here. the heat shield honeycomb → block change sounds like a classic cost/complexity tradeoff where you lose structural integrity for easier manufacturing.

reminds me of automotive safety recalls that trace back to "simplified" component designs. sometimes the old complex way was complex for a reason.

Maciej now has a Mars newsletter, which I obviously subscribed to immediately: https://mceglowski.substack.com/

I didn’t even have a strong interest in space before the dude started writing about it. Maciej could write about literal rocks and make it worthwhile to read.

> That context is a moon program that has spent close to $100 billion and 25 years with nothing to show for itself, at an agency that has just experienced mass firings and been through a near-death experience with its science budget. The charismatic new Administrator has staked his reputation on increasing launch cadence, and set an explicit goal of landing astronauts on the Moon before President Trump’s term expires in January of 2029.

So, rushing, to fulfill an arbitrary PR schedule dictated by further chasing of the yesteryears of America instead of calmly evaluating "what did we screw up, what needs to be fixed, and what can we do about it in order to bring this into reality, safely?"

"Things of quality have no fear of time" should be carved into the walls at NASA.

“…in early 2026, NASA decided to add an additional Artemis mission to the manifest. The new Artemis III would fly in 2027 as a near-Earth mission to test docking with whatever lunar lander (Blue Origin or SpaceX) was available. The first moon landing would be pushed back to the mission after that, Artemis IV. This change removed any rationale for flying astronauts on Artemis II.”

Is there truly no engineering or science merit to flying astronauts by the Moon?

Why don't they use Starship, seems like Musk's company has a great record overall for designing and operating spacecraft. I asked Gemini, of course Boeing is in the picture: "NASA has contracts with multiple partners (Boeing, Lockheed Martin) for the SLS and Orion, and shifting entirely to Starship would require canceling these expensive, legally binding contracts.".

I wonder what the heat shield engineers actually think of this. It's my understanding that in the Challenger disaster, the engineers were aware of the problem and tried to do something about it, but management weren't having it

I have a bad feeling about this project.

It reminds me of both the movies Capricorn 1 and Iron Sky ... and not in any good way.

Hypothetical to wrap my head around scope: Say we had a spacecraft that was 100% capable of launching from Earth, orbiting the moon, and landing back on Earth, but it also had the docking equipment to be compatible with ISS. Could I decide, while orbiting the moon, that I'd rather dock with the ISS instead? Is that at all feasible or is it one of those, "we're not lined up for any of this. It's basically impossible." things?

Never thought I would randomly run into Idle Words again but here we are !

And this is definitely concerning stuff

Isn't this the exact kind of scenario where you'd hope someone from above (like, idk, the president) would block the launch?

Not that I expect that to happen, but worth keeping in mind in case something horrible happens. NASA wouldn't be the only one responsible for lost lives.

Related: NASA's Orion Space Capsule Is Flaming Garbage by Casey Handmer https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45794242

Is Orion’s heat shield really safe? New NASA chief conducts final review on eve of flight. https://arstechnica.com/space/2026/01/nasa-chief-reviews-ori...

Isn’t any flight into space risky? I doubt that the first flights were safer than this one.

Definitely concerned to hear but I’m hopeful that the core of nasa is intact. They’re some of the kindest and smartest people I’ve had the pleasure of meeting. They don’t joke around with lives on the line. I hope the best for everyone involved. I’ll be watching the launch of Artemis 2 and 3 with excitement and hope.

it doesnt matter, they have to produce some kind of result at this point lets go get em up there

I'm nowhere near qualified to say if the design is not safe, but I'm suprised the article doesn't mention that some heat shields are designed to indeed, blow chunks: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atmospheric_entry#Ablative

Each of the program managers responsible for go/no-go are to take an oath of death. If there is a loss of crew and it can be attributed to the foreknown 3 different issues (heat shield spalling, heat shield fragment impacts, bolt erosion), then you die.

> But do we really have to wait for astronauts to die to re-learn the same lessons a third time?

Humans don't seem to learn in the way we think or what them to

Let's not forget that, much more recently than Challenger and Columbia, NASA showed signs of launch fever in the Starliner program.

Starliner was not safe to fly either, thrusters couldn't be trusted, but Boeing and NASA managed pushed on and decided to fly anyway. The flight demonstrated that the problems were bad indeed. NASA communications pretended things were not good but not disastrous.

Turns out things were much worse than NASA and Boeing wanted to admit: https://arstechnica.com/space/2026/02/nasa-chief-classifies-...

“Starliner has design and engineering deficiencies that must be corrected, but the most troubling failure revealed by this investigation is not hardware,” Isaacman wrote in his letter to the NASA workforce. “It is decision-making and leadership that, if left unchecked, could create a culture incompatible with human spaceflight.”

Still, after astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams eventually docked at the station, Boeing officials declared it a success. “We accomplished a lot, and really more than expected,” said Mark Nappi, vice president and manager of Boeing’s Commercial Crew Program, during a post-docking news conference. “We just had an outstanding day.”

The true danger the astronauts faced on board Starliner was not publicly revealed until after they landed and flew back to Houston. In an interview with Ars, Wilmore described the tense minutes when he had to take control of Starliner as its thrusters began to fail, one after the other.

One thing that has surprised outside observers since publication of Wilmore’s harrowing experience is how NASA, knowing all of this, could have seriously entertained bringing the crew home on Starliner.

Isaacman clearly had questions as well. He began reviewing the internal report on Starliner, published last November, almost immediately after becoming the space agency administrator in December. He wanted to understand why NASA insisted publicly for so long that it would bring astronauts back on Starliner, even though there was a safe backup option with Crew Dragon.

“Pretending that that did not exist, and focusing exclusively on a single pathway, created a cultural issue that leadership should have been able to step in and course correct,” Isaacman said during the teleconference. “What levels of the organization inside of NASA did that exist at? Multiple levels, including, I would say, right up to the administrator of NASA.”

Some of NASA’s biggest lapses in judgment occurred before the crew flight test, the report found. In particular, these revolved around the second orbital flight test of Starliner, which took place two years earlier, in May 2022.

During this flight, which was declared to be successful, three of the thrusters on the Starliner Service Module failed. In hindsight, this should have raised huge red flags for what was to come during the mission of Wilmore and Williams two years later.

However, in his letter to NASA employees, Isaacman said the NASA and Boeing investigations into these failures did not push hard enough to find the root cause of the thruster failures.

And so on. Lots of parallels with the Artemis program, though in Artemis Isaacman doesn't seem to be following his own conclusions from the Starliner failure.

To some extent I think since the challenger disaster trying to blow the whistle on safety issues at NASA has been romantacized.

For me, so long as the information is transparently discussed with the astronauts they can agree or disagree. But the task is intrinsically extremely risky.

It makes it very challenging for anyone to really know how to balance those risks.

The peak outcome (modal, mean at least) is a good outcome. But the tail is very very long with all the little ways a catastrophe can occur. I think the median outcome is also deeply in the "good" category.

And we sample this curve a few times a decade!

Right or wrong about this, none of us can do much about it at this point. The die is cast. I guess we'll just wait and see.

What I don't get is why the heck are the astronauts willing to risk their lives on something they must know by now is so dangerous? Is it really better to risk death than to risk getting fired?

NASA operates as a terminal, bloated monopoly that has completely severed its feedback loops with physical reality in favor of preserving a 25-year-old architectural fantasy. The Orion heat shield is essentially a buggy hardware release being pushed into a mission-critical production environment despite the fact that its own internal telemetry is screaming about a catastrophic failure. By choosing to ignore the spalling and the melted structural bolts, the agency is deliberately discarding the engineering equivalent of core dump data to maintain a schedule that satisfies political optics rather than Newtonian physics.

One thing I'm missing here, did the heat shield actually burn through on the earlier test or not?

Fortunately, the most likely outcome is another indefinite delay at the last minute.

The author seems to have a pretty extensive history of… strong disdain for Artemis II. While has mentioned concerns about the heat shield before it was in the context of a laundry list of complaints, and it was nowhere close to the top.

I’m not a rocket scientist, but then neither is the author.

tufte

Sean Duffy:

"do not let safety be the enemy of progress"

aka some of you may die but I'm okay with that and will sleep fine

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/interim-nasa-head-tells...

Can't they do a few loops around the planet and skim only the upper atmosphere? always worked well for me on kerbal space program, haha

I wouldn't be nearly so concerned if not for the blatant coverup and downplaying from NASA. This makes the whole situation easily pattern match to Apollo 1, Challenger and Columbia, where political pressure to ignore problems and drive forward anyway got people needlessly killed.

Does it count as inclusion if we blow up the most gender and race diverse crew in history?

Welcome back, Maciej!

It's not actually Avcoat. It was changed by LM. Thw honeycomb was removed. Imagine a beehive with no honeycomb and a slop of honey is what you have. Crystallized/solid honey, but honey never the less.