NASA's Moon Capsule Suffered Extensive Damage During 2022's Test Flight (msn.com) 31
An anonymous reader shared this report from the Washington Post:
The heat shield of the Orion spacecraft intended one day to carry astronauts to the moon under NASA's Artemis program suffered unexpected damage in more than 100 places as the spacecraft returned to Earth during an uncrewed test flight in 2022, according to a watchdog report released late Wednesday.
While the capsule withstood the fiery tumult of reentry, when temperatures reached 5,000 degrees Fahrenheit as it plunged through the atmosphere at nearly 25,000 mph, the damage the heat shield suffered was far greater than NASA engineers had expected and more severe than NASA had revealed previously. Photos of the heat shield in the report showed gouges that look like small potholes. "Should the same issue occur on future Artemis missions, it could lead to the loss of the vehicle or crew," the report, by NASA's inspector general, concluded... The IG report provides the most detailed description of the issue to date. It also highlighted other problems with the spacecraft that could create significant challenges for the space agency as it seeks to return humans to the lunar surface for the first time in more than 50 years.
Portions of the heat shield "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," according to the report. That, in turn, "could have caused enough structural damage to cause one of Orion's parachutes to fail...." In addition to the heat shield erosion on Orion, which is manufactured by Lockheed Martin, the IG said several bolts on the crew module "experienced an exposed gap that allowed for increased heating to the bolt interior and greater than expected melting and erosion."
Earlier this year, NASA announced the next flight for its moon program — sending a crew of four around the moon — would be delayed, according to the article. The moon-orbiting mission would now occur "no earlier than September 2025, largely because officials wanted to study the heat shield issue further and understand why it eroded as it did."
The article adds that this new report "casts doubt on both NASA's rosy original assessment of the test flight" — as well as the likelihood that a lunar landing will occur by late 2026.
While the capsule withstood the fiery tumult of reentry, when temperatures reached 5,000 degrees Fahrenheit as it plunged through the atmosphere at nearly 25,000 mph, the damage the heat shield suffered was far greater than NASA engineers had expected and more severe than NASA had revealed previously. Photos of the heat shield in the report showed gouges that look like small potholes. "Should the same issue occur on future Artemis missions, it could lead to the loss of the vehicle or crew," the report, by NASA's inspector general, concluded... The IG report provides the most detailed description of the issue to date. It also highlighted other problems with the spacecraft that could create significant challenges for the space agency as it seeks to return humans to the lunar surface for the first time in more than 50 years.
Portions of the heat shield "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," according to the report. That, in turn, "could have caused enough structural damage to cause one of Orion's parachutes to fail...." In addition to the heat shield erosion on Orion, which is manufactured by Lockheed Martin, the IG said several bolts on the crew module "experienced an exposed gap that allowed for increased heating to the bolt interior and greater than expected melting and erosion."
Earlier this year, NASA announced the next flight for its moon program — sending a crew of four around the moon — would be delayed, according to the article. The moon-orbiting mission would now occur "no earlier than September 2025, largely because officials wanted to study the heat shield issue further and understand why it eroded as it did."
The article adds that this new report "casts doubt on both NASA's rosy original assessment of the test flight" — as well as the likelihood that a lunar landing will occur by late 2026.
Tests rarely go better than expected (Score:4, Insightful)
Finding unexpected problems is just part of testing, both software and hardware. Russia kept tuning existing Soyuz design and got prices and down and reliability up. US capitalism is addicted to throw-out-and-start-over because investors don't get excited by incremental improvements; they pay for buzz.
It would have been cheaper to send 2 time-tested Apollo missions to have a crew of 5 than reinventing one big Orion. And 2nd would be an emergency backup: crowded but survivable.
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I was going to say, iterative design. Starship suffered pretty extensive damage the first time they sent that up, the only difference is that everyone was expecting it to explode.
Re: Tests rarely go better than expected (Score:1)
The US navy just did the same thing with their constellation frigate.
Said they were going to go with an existing design, from another country, then changed 85% of the design. Now the program is a mess.
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What's needed is a cow. Cows have known how to jump over the moon for centuries, we just need to learn how to strap on the appropriate harness.
The hard part is finding a spherical cow that can survive in a vacuum.
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Hoover or Dyson?
Hoover. Dyson is a sphere, and you can't have a spherical cow in a spherical vacuum.
Re: Tests rarely go better than expected (Score:2)
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Only works if lots of whiskey used for fuel. I think you got into some.
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What's needed is a cow
That cow never jumped over the moon man, Mother Goose faked the whole thing and Hans Christian Anderson backed her up like the shill he is...wake up sheeple!
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Exactly. That's why test test flights are a thing.
So they learned something. The day was not wasted.
Don’t dismiss the real problem. (Score:2)
the damage the heat shield suffered was far greater than NASA engineers had expected and more severe than NASA had revealed previously.
While the throw-it-out-and-start-over mentality is bad, it’s nothing compared to the necessity of a “watchdog” organization to finally get NASA to be fucking honest about their program here.
Its quite pathetic that America still has the balls to bitch about how corrupt other countries are.
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Nothing is "wrong" here." NASA had an initial estimate, did a full examination during Orion I, and revised after the full examination before Orion II went into production. This is normal.
Specifically, NASA identified more than 100 locations where ablative thermal protective material from Orion’s heat shield wore away differently than expected during reentry into Earth’s atmosphere. Engineers are concurrently investigating ways to mitigate the char loss by modifying the heat shield’s des
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Nothing is "wrong" here." NASA had an initial estimate, did a full examination during Orion I, and revised after the full examination before Orion II went into production. This is normal.
the damage the heat shield suffered was far greater than NASA engineers had expected and more severe than NASA had revealed previously.
Is it normal to use the words “had revealed previously” and somehow be talking about an organization chock full of morals and ethics suffering from an addiction to full transparency, unburdened by performance metrics justified with budget approvals?
Why did they fail to reveal that previously if nothing wrong or bad would happen?
Melting away? (Score:3, Funny)
Portions of the heat shield "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," ...
But I thought an Onion was suppose to be peeled apart in pieces and layers. Oh, wait... it's "Orion"? Never mind.
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Hope this isn't a problem (Score:2)
for the crew that's about to take a ride.
Or do I have my spaceships mixed up?
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for the crew that's about to take a ride.
Or do I have my spaceships mixed up?
If by "about to", you mean September of next year, then maybe it might, but I suspect you're thinking of the Boeing Starliner crewed test in a couple of days. Completely unrelated.
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Let me know when they get to Battlestar.
Read the whole report (Score:5, Insightful)
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Didn't seem to be a problem in1969. Maybe the engineers are too distracted by tiktok.
Did Not Promise A Rose Garden (Score:2)
NASA: We Said We Could Get You To The Moon
NASA: Getting Back Safely Is A Problem For Elon Musk To Solve ... So Talk To Him About That
a bit misleading (Score:4, Interesting)
It's "NASA's capsule" in the sense that NASA provided a set of criteria, then selected design submitted by one of the companies that bid on it. It's not, however, NASA's by virtue of NASA designing and building it - Lockheed Martin designed and built it under a contract with NASA.
Funny [in the curious and interesting way] thing about it is that the heat shield is one of the primary selling points that NASA used to justify the hyper-expensive Orion capsule purchases over SpaceX's Dragon for lunar missions. NASA was originally going to go with modern shuttle- and Dragon-style fully re-usable heat shield tiles which keep the heat away from the vehicle's structure without being degraded. Lockheed could not get them to work properly for Orion and thus NASA and Lockheed went back to a version of the Apollo-style AVCOAT ablative shield. These were sold as a proven solution (it worked on Apollo!) that would be quick to implement (we have all the data from the Apollo era already!) but they are heavier than the reusable more modern tiles, so this affected Orion's weight margins, and since they are ablative (they shed heat, in part, by being charred and shed gradually) they can only be used once. Meanwhile, SpaceX's vastly more affordable Dragons are routinely flying to/from the ISS with people aboard and were doing so long before Orion's first manned mission. Oh, and the Dragon heat shield is designed for reentry at lunar return trajectory speeds, so the heat shield related excuses for Orion on lunar missions have evaporated.
Of course, SLS and Orion are not really about space... the congress spec'd these and expects the right jobs to exist in the correct congressional districts.
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Of course, SLS and Orion are not really about space... the congress spec'd these and expects the right jobs to exist in the correct congressional districts.
SLS has regularly been referred to as the Senate Launch System.
What Happened? (Score:2)
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In this case, the answer is probably cost -- they probably want to make it easier to reuse the same capsule.
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Apollo had two reentry tests in Project Fire and two more tests of the actual capsule. This was the first test of Orion.
"Built to last X years" generally means a certain probability of everything, or nearly everything, working well for that long. They had very little idea what conditions the Voyagers would encounter, so that was a pretty fuzzy number. Even knowing much more, space missions still almost always outperform their "built to last" times, usually by many multiples.
Refrigerators in the 1940s were s
predicted (Score:2)
" "wore away differently than NASA engineers predicted,"
NASA engineers didn't predict, a computer model predicted. A computer model much simpler than climate models. Fortunately, running an experiment showed where the model might have problems.
New slogan (Score:2)
Poor heat shield?
"It's good to be blackened on the Moon."
(with apologies to Space Force)
In order to meet the schedule (Score:2)