NASA had a tough decision to make after the Orion spacecraft’s heat shield came back with severe damage on the Artemis I mission: Stick with it at the possible risk of human lives, or replace it and face even more delays for Artemis II?

NASA opted to stick with it, confident any damage could be avoided by simply changing the trajectory of spacecraft’s reentry. That gamble paid off with a successful splashdown in the Pacific for Artemis II on April 10.

Now, more than a week later, initial inspections show the heat shield “performed as expected, with no unusual conditions identified,” according to NASA.

The agency said there was still some damage, but Orion safely brought home NASA astronauts Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover and Christina Koch along with Canadian Space Agency astronaut Jeremy Hansen after a 10-day lunar flyby.

“We came in fast. We came in hot. And I will tell you, looking out the window that whole way in, it was a smooth ride. It was a very smooth ride,” Wiseman said during a post-landing press conference.

NASA had previously stated the reentry speed would hit 23,742 mph, or about 31 times the speed of sound, during which temperatures could range up to 5,000 degrees Fahrenheit.

On Artemis I, the uncrewed flight of Orion, NASA had opted for a longer reentry trajectory that featured the spacecraft dipping in and out of the atmosphere like a skipping rock to help it slow its speed before landing.

At the end of that earlier flight, the agency found more than 100 places on the heat shield’s protective coating, or char layer, ended up “cracking and breaking off the spacecraft in fragments that created a trail of debris rather than melting away as designed,” according to a report from NASA’s Office of the Inspector General that came out in 2024.

The risk to the spacecraft and its crew was real. The report noted a piece of that debris could easily take out one of its parachutes.

Some charring still occurred on Artemis II, but not to a dangerous level, according to NASA.

“I think (Glover) and I maybe saw two moments of a touch of char loss,” Wiseman said.

He noted all four were able to check out Orion after it had been brought on board the recovery ship, the USS John P. Murtha. He said they could see a little bit of char loss on the shoulder of the heat shield, where it meets the structure of the cone shape of the spacecraft.

“We leaned under and looked at the bottom,” he said. “For four humans just looking at the heat shield. It looked wonderful to us. It looked great.”

NASA on Monday released an update on the heat shield, including imagery taken by U.S. Navy divers immediately after splashdown.

“Great imagery. We were all extremely interested right after splashdown. Grateful to the Navy divers who supported Artemis II”, NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman posted on X.

A NASA press release stated that imagery and further inspections once it was out of the water showed the char loss behavior seen on Artemis I “as significantly reduced, both in terms of quantity and size.”

It also stated its performance was consistent with tests that had been done ahead of launch. NASA will still pore over imagery taken from aircraft during Orion’s descent.

“This imagery will provide insight into the timing of when minimal char loss occurred, as well as other heat shield data,” NASA stated.

More examination will be done when the spacecraft returns to Kennedy Space Center this month at the Multi-Payload Processing Facility. The heat shield will be transported to NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, where teams will extract samples and perform x-ray scans.

At this point, NASA said the char loss that did occur would not slow down efforts to launch Artemis III in 2027. That Orion spacecraft will also feature a reworked heat shield, with what NASA engineer Tim Otterson called “a tweaking of the recipe” for its protective coating.

“It’s more of a refining the recipe versus an entirely new recipe,” he said.

The Artemis III mission will also be crewed, but not fly to the moon. Instead, it will remain close to Earth with a goal of docking with one or both of two moon landers being developed. That would then set up Artemis IV as early as 2028, which aims to return humans to the lunar surface for the first time since Apollo 17 in 1972.

The heat shield won’t be as taxed on speeds and temperatures on Artemis III as it will be for the Artemis IV mission, though.

“We’re looking to have both our ground testing and Artemis III to show that the new recipe is meeting our performance requirements,” Otterson said. “If that’s the case, then there shouldn’t be a reason to change going forward. But I would never say never.”

For his part, Glover reveled in what he called “a very intense 13 minutes and 36 seconds,” especially the first jolt of the initial drogue parachutes that slowed Orion to 136 mph ahead of the three main parachutes deploying.

“When the drogues cut away, we went back to freefall … I’ve never been BASE jumping. I’ve never been skydiving, but if you dove off a skyscraper backwards, that’s what it felt like for five seconds, and then the (main parachutes) came out, and it was it was glorious,” he said.

Wiseman said he expects NASA to not let up on the heat shield investigation.

“They are going to do to this heat shield what they did to Artemis I,” he said. “We are going to fine tooth comb every single, not even every molecule, probably every atom.”

_____

©2026 Orlando Sentinel. Visit at orlandosentinel.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.