{"id":685157,"date":"2026-01-09T19:46:10","date_gmt":"2026-01-09T19:46:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/685157\/"},"modified":"2026-01-09T19:46:10","modified_gmt":"2026-01-09T19:46:10","slug":"is-orions-heat-shield-really-safe-new-nasa-chief-conducts-final-review-on-eve-of-flight","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/685157\/","title":{"rendered":"Is Orion\u2019s heat shield really safe? New NASA chief conducts final review on eve of flight."},"content":{"rendered":"

Olivas is very credible on these issues. He was asked by the NASA leadership in late 2023, before the independent review team was formally named, to provide a second set of eyes on the space agency\u2019s heat shield work. He saw all of the investigative data in real time. Although not formally a member, he sat in on the review team\u2019s meetings through 2024 before that process ended. Afterward, he had some lingering questions he felt were unresolved by that process. A few weeks ago, he told Pearlman and me he would be reluctant to fly on Orion. It was a stunning admission.<\/p>\n

Isaacman appeared to take these concerns seriously. In advance of Thursday\u2019s meeting, he engaged with Olivas to hear him out and share information about what NASA\u2019s engineers had done over the last 18 months to resolve some of the independent review team\u2019s questions. These included char loss very early in Orion\u2019s reentry.<\/p>\n

After Thursday\u2019s meeting, Olivas told me he had changed his mind, expressing appreciation and admiration for the in-depth engineering work done by the NASA team. He would now fly on Orion.<\/p>\n

Camarda, another former shuttle astronaut, was less effusive. He has been very public with his criticism of NASA\u2019s handling of the Orion heat shield. He told me in December 2024<\/a> that the space agency and its leadership team should be \u201cashamed.\u201d Unlike Olivas, however, he has been on the outside the whole time. NASA had kept Camarda, 73, at arm\u2019s length, and he felt disrespected. Given his credentials\u2014the aerospace engineer spent two decades working on thermal protection for the space shuttle and hypersonic vehicles\u2013Camarda could be a potent voice of skepticism leading up to the Artemis II launch.<\/p>\n

After the meeting, I asked Camarda whether he felt any better about flying crew on the Artemis II heat shield.<\/p>\n

\u201cI would never be happy accepting a workaround and flying something that I know is the worst version of that heat shield we could possibly fly and hoping that the workaround is going to fix it,\u201d Camarda said. \u201cWhat I really hope he [Isaacman] gets is that if we don\u2019t get back to doing research at NASA, we\u2019re not going to be able to help Starship solve their problems. We\u2019ve got to get back to doing research.\u201d<\/p>\n

But Camarda was no longer the firebrand he was at the outset of the meeting. Near its end, in fact, he even thanked the leadership team for being brought in, read in on the data, and allowed to have his say.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Olivas is very credible on these issues. He was asked by the NASA leadership in late 2023, before…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":685158,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3844],"tags":[70,413,16,15],"class_list":{"0":"post-685157","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-space","8":"tag-science","9":"tag-space","10":"tag-uk","11":"tag-united-kingdom"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/115866868027449459","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/685157","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=685157"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/685157\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/685158"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=685157"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=685157"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=685157"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}