Artemis 2, the mission to take four astronauts to and from the moon, will be delayed from September 2025 to April 2026, NASA announced at a press conference on Thursday. Artemis 3, which will be the first human landing on the moon in more than half a century, has been postponed from 2026 to mid-2027. According to NASA, extra time will be required to complete the preparation of Urine’s capsule for its first manned flight in the first place.
The Orion spacecraft has made two flights so far: a short trip to Earth orbit in 2014 and Artemis 1’s 25-day lunar orbit flight in 2022. At first, Artemis 1 seemed to go well; But subsequent analysis showed that Orion’s heat shield had worn down more than engineers expected during re-entry. This issue did not affect the temperature of the spacecraft cabin; This means that the astronauts would remain safe if they were present in Uran; But the engineers had to figure out why the heat shield was so damaged.
Now, after two years of Artemis 1, the results of the analyzes have been published. Heterogeneous erosion of the heat shield was the consequence of Urain’s jump-like return path; This means that the spacecraft jumped out of the earth’s atmosphere like a pebble thrown into a pond and then re-entered it. This strategy is necessary to discharge the enormous energy resulting from the return from the moon at a very high speed; But the Artemis 1 mission had an unexpected outcome.
“As the capsule dipped in and out of the atmosphere as part of a planned jump-like entry, heat built up in the outer layer of the heat shield, causing gas to form and become trapped inside,” said Pamela Melroy, NASA’s deputy administrator. This event resulted in the creation of internal pressure and caused cracking and irregular separation of the outer layer of the shield.
Melroy and other NASA officials announced that based on further studies, the Orion heat shield can protect astronauts during the 10-day mission of Artemis 2, and there is no need to build a new version of it; But mission planners are changing the spacecraft’s reentry path to minimize the problems experienced on Artemis 1.
