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Former NASA engineer Dr. Charles Camarda had publicly warned that NASA didn’t fully understand the root cause of the cracking
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The capsule splashed down safely in the Pacific, capping the first crewed lunar mission since Apollo 17 in 1972.
Key facts
- After nearly 10 days in space, complete with a historic loop around the moon, the four astronauts on NASA’s Artemis II mission faced their most dangerous moment yet: not in deep space
- It’s 13 minutes of things that have to go right,” said NASA’s Artemis II flight director Jeff Radigan on Thursday at a news briefing
- The 16.5-foot-wide heat shield reached approximately 5,000 degrees Fahrenheit, about half the temperature of the sun’s visible surface
- The capsule splashed down safely in the Pacific, capping the first crewed lunar mission since Apollo 17 in 1972
Summary
After nearly 10 days in space, complete with a historic loop around the moon, the four astronauts on NASA’s Artemis II mission faced their most dangerous moment yet: not in deep space, but in the final 13 minutes of their journey home. “It’s 13 minutes of things that have to go right,” said NASA’s Artemis II flight director Jeff Radigan on Thursday at a news briefing. Before the Orion spacecraft, named Integrity by the crew, ever left the Kennedy Space Center launchpad in Florida on April 1, NASA knew there was a problem. Here’s the issue: it’s not supposed to do that. When the capsule briefly climbed back out of the atmosphere during its “skip” (meaning skip entry, which is when a spacecraft returning from high speed dips into the earth’s upper atmosphere. It’s the guided maneuver it uses to skip along the layer, closely mirroring a stone “skipping” across a pond, all before it reenters for a final landing.