NASA's Office of the Inspector General has released a report that has raised serious doubts about the ability of the manned spacecraft lobbied by this agency to reach the Moon in 2026, as envisaged by the American space program. Industry observers believe that the ship can be replaced with SpaceX's Starship, but NASA has so far rejected discussion of this option. If adopted, it would be a moral disaster for the agency.
The United States plans to land on the moon in 2026. NASA's plan initially relied on the use of the SLS rocket (due to the lobbying and corruption element in it, the Americans jokingly call it the Senate Launch System ) and the Orion manned spacecraft. Both of them are performed by traditional NASA contractors, so the agency pays $ 4.3 billion for one launch, which is more than the annual budget of Roscosmos and ten times more than NASA previously paid SpaceX for the development of the Falcon 9 rocket and the Dragon spacecraft.
To justify such costs, NASA traditionally refers to the fact that SpaceX ships are too small for a comfortable flight of people to the Moon, and Starship is deprived of an automatic crew rescue system (due to its capacity of hundreds of people, it would be technically unrealistic), and therefore cannot be accepted by the agency for takeoff from Earth. However, an important prerequisite for justifying such rhetoric should be the operability of the Orion itself.
Rumors had already leaked earlier that there was something wrong with this. But a new report from NASA's Office of the Inspector General shows the public for the first time what exactly it is about. He states that in 2022, during the tests of the Orion, it returned to Earth abnormally. For full-fledged tests of such a ship, it must fly to the Moon and return from it, entering the Earth's atmosphere at a speed of about 11 kilometers per second.
This is tens of percent faster than when a spacecraft returns from near-Earth orbit, so during braking about the atmosphere, Orion had to extinguish energy almost twice as much as that extinguished by ships returning from the ISS. In order for friction against the atmosphere at such a speed not to overheat the ship, it is equipped with an enhanced version of an ablative heat shield, which partially evaporates, carrying away excess thermal energy from the ship with evaporating particles.
According to the Management report, the ablation shield on Orion, made of AvCoat material, worked abnormally in 2022. Instead of uniform removal of material from its entire surface, the shield began to partially collapse in the upper atmosphere. Small fragments broke off from it, under which the shield material for some reason was painted, and not blown away evenly.
That Orion flight was unmanned, so there were no risks. Again, the spacecraft's sensors showed no threat to potential astronauts. But, the report notes, the root cause of the partial destruction of the heat shield has not been established in these one and a half years. If it is unknown, then it is difficult to guarantee that in another flight the destruction of the shield will not go further and will not create conditions dangerous for astronauts. Moreover, the Department's report notes that pieces falling off the heat shield could potentially disrupt the operation of one of Orion's braking parachutes. In this case, the rate of its fall in the lower atmosphere may be too high to ensure a safe landing. "If this happened in future Artemis missions, it could lead to the loss of the ship or crew," the document says.
The next flight under the Artemis program is aimed at September 2025. Then four astronauts will have to fly to the Moon, fly around it without landing and return to Earth. Considering that after a year and a half of searching for the causes of the shield's destruction, they could not be identified, it is not obvious that this will happen by September 2025. In general, it is difficult to do this, since it is difficult to reproduce atmospheric entry conditions at 11 kilometers per second in a ground laboratory, to put it mildly. The ideal solution would be another test flight without people. But given its price of 4.3 billion dollars, NASA does not have money for it, and it is unlikely that they will give it to him.
Instead of uniform evaporation, the ablative shield for some reason began to be painted in large chunks, creating a string of flying pieces of the shield behind the falling ship. It is clear that when hitting the domes of parachutes, such pieces can really create problems
Image source: NASA
In this regard, the Agency will face a difficult choice next year. It will either launch four people, knowing that an anomaly has already occurred on board that could kill the crew, or it will not launch such a flight, and then it will disrupt the timing of the moon landing in 2026.
The American industry press writes about another option: to replace the problematic Orion with Starship. As Naked Science has already noted, by 2026, Starship should make quite a few test flights that will give confidence in its reliability. Problems with the ablation shield do not threaten him, since he does not have such a shield: he performs braking in the atmosphere by burning fuel and by turning the entire rocket when falling. Thermal protection is carried out there without evaporative material, only due to thermal insulation tiles.
Technically, such a replacement is possible. NASA's bureaucratic rule on the need for an emergency crew rescue system can be circumvented by delivering people into orbit in the small manned SpaceX Crew Dragon spacecraft, where such a system exists.
Nevertheless, it will be very difficult for NASA to decide on such an option. Congress gave the agency money for Orion and SLS, and Congress wants to see orders for them, since $4.3 billion for each launch is good money. Congressmen won't understand if these orders don't happen. Of course, it would be possible to take people on Orion into low-Earth orbit, but then the public and the White House will not understand NASA: Orion launches are incomparably more expensive than Crew Dragon on Falcon 9 rockets from SpaceX.
All this casts doubt on the short-term prospects of the US landing on the Moon in 2026. However, as Naked Science already stated in his video podcast, there were no such prospects anyway, because the American contractor companies responsible for manufacturing spacesuits for the lunar mission also do not cope with their tasks on time. Nevertheless, the current situation with the partial destruction of the Orion heat shield will be a big problem for NASA. After all, it is possible to report that there is no way out with spacesuits in 2026, and problems with the shield may force the agency to report the disruption of the landing program as early as 2025.
Alexander Berezin
