NASA Prepares Moon Mission Amid Safety Concerns Over Spacecraft
By Muhammad MubashirPublished On 28 Jan 2026
When four astronauts begin a historic trip around the moon as soon 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 relates to a special coating applied to the bottom part of the spacecraft, called the heat shield. It’s a crucial piece of hardware designed to protect the astronauts from extreme temperatures as they’re descending back to Earth during the final stretch of their moon-bound mission called Artemis II.
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 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 Center, where its heat shield was removed and inspected.
NASA
Still, Olivas said he believes after spending years analyzing 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.
“I think in my mind, there’s no flight that ever takes off where you don’t have a lingering doubt,” Olivas said. “But NASA really does understand what they have. They know the importance of the heat shield to crew safety, and I do believe that they’ve done the job.”
Lakiesha Hawkins, the acting deputy associate administrator for NASA’s Exploration Systems Development Mission Directorate, echoed that sentiment in September, saying, “from a risk perspective, we feel very confident.”
And Reid Wiseman, the astronaut set to command the Artemis II mission, has expressed his confidence.
“The investigators discovered the root cause, which was the key” to understanding and solving the heat shield issue, Wiseman told reporters last July. “If we stick to the new reentry path that NASA has planned, then this heat shield will be safe to fly.”
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 defense 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.”
The decisions that led up to the heat shield issues NASA is grappling with today began early in the spacecraft’s development process, according to Pope.
Orion program managers chose to make the spacecraft’s heat shield out of Avcoat material in 2009. The heat shields manufactured for NASA’s Apollo capsules all had a protective Avcoat layer, so leaders viewed it as a well-understood material with decades of data to back up its effectiveness.
For an uncrewed test flight in 2014, called EFT-1, the mission team outfitted an Orion capsule with a heat shield applied in the same manner as in the Apollo era — in an intricate honeycomb-like structure.
But that approach required a tedious manufacturing process that NASA hoped to avoid.
For the first test flight of Orion, the heat shield ablative material reached temperatures of about 4,000 degrees Fahrenheit (2,200 degrees Celsius).
Emmett Given/NASA/MSFC
“It was very finicky, and it was going to be really, really hard to reproduce that quickly,” said Pam Melroy, a longtime NASA employee, former astronaut and Air Force officer who once served as deputy administrator of the space agency. “That was part of the reason why we said, ‘Let’s just make this a simpler design.’ It was really all about producibility.”
Even before the EFT-1 test flight launched, NASA program managers wanted to alter the design, according to Melroy. Though NASA said in a statement the final decision was made in 2015.
NASA also said the honeycomb-structured Avcoat experienced issues during manufacturing for EFT-1, noting “cracks in seams appeared between the different honeycomb sections” and the material did not cure evenly and was weaker than expected. That made it “marginally acceptable” for the 2014 test flight and likely unusable for a lunar mission that requires far faster speeds and a more violent reentry process.
Textron Systems, the Texas-based company that produces Avcoat, told CNN in a statement that in 2015 it “licensed the Avcoat material to Lockheed Martin, who is contracted by NASA to manufacture the heat shields for the Artemis program” and deferred further comment to the aerospace giant.
Blaine Brown, director of Orion Spacecraft Mechanical Systems at Lockheed Martin Space, confirmed in a statement to CNN that the Avcoat structure was altered “to increase manufacturing and installation efficiency.”
“We support NASA’s decision to fly the Artemis II mission with its current heat shield and are committed to seeing Orion safely launch and return on its historic mission to the Moon with crew onboard,” Brown said.
The Orion capsules built for the Artemis missions abandoned the Avcoat honeycomb structure in favor of a heat shield constructed using large blocks of the material.
An Orion heat shield configured using the block structure is seen.
Isaac Watson/NASA
“Our experience with a block design on Mars heat shields showed us that blocks were easier to produce, test and install,” Brown said.
The first real-world test of the new Orion heat shield design, however, came with the Artemis I test flight in 2022. After that mission, NASA found chunks of the heat shield had broken off, leaving divots in the charred Avcoat material.
That is not how the heat shield is supposed to behave. The Avcoat layer is meant to erode in a controlled manner as it heats.
NASA disclosed the problem months after Orion returned from space in 2022. The agency’s office of the inspector general then released images of the ravaged Artemis I heat shield in a 2024 report.
Images show the heat shield post-Artemis I mission, including cavities resulting from the loss of large chunks of the heat shield during reentry.
NASA
Further complicating the situation was the fact that by that point it was already too late to fix the heat shield for Artemis II.
NASA did not — and could not — replace the Artemis II heat shield with a new one. The Orion capsule slated for the mission already had its heat shield installed even before Artemis I flew, and “you couldn’t just go to Billy Bob’s heat shield removal shop” to replace it, Olivas noted.
The investigation into the Artemis I heat shield issue also concluded that even though there were no astronauts on board the test flight, “flight data showed that had crew been aboard, they would have been safe.”
When asked about NASA’s decision to move forward with the Artemis II mission without replacing the heat shield, Melroy, who oversaw the heat shield investigation as deputy administrator, said that NASA “program managers sometimes have to make these trades for cost, schedule and performance, and they certainly didn’t undertake that decision lightly.”
