‘It’s 13 minutes of things that have to go right’: Artemis II splashes down despite faulty heat shield

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. During the unmanned Artemis I mission in 2022, engineers discovered more than 100 locations on the Orion heat shield that had cracked and broken off during reentry.

Here’s the issue: it’s not supposed to do that. The shield was designed to melt away, not pop off in chunks. Instead, scientists discovered the culprit was a pressure problem buried within the shield itself. As the capsule dipped into the atmosphere, internal layers became scorching hot through a process called pyrolysis, trapping gas.

When the capsule briefly climbed back out of the atmosphere during its “skip” (meaning skip entry, which is when a spacecraft re...