Within hours of NASA announcing its decision to fly the Artemis II mission aboard an Orion spacecraft with an unmodified heat shield, critics assailed the space agency, saying it had made the wrong decision.
“Expediency won over safety and good materials science and engineering. Sad day for NASA,” Ed Pope, an expert in advanced materials and heat shields, wrote on LinkedIn.
There is a lot riding on NASA’s decision, as the Artemis II mission involves four astronauts and the space agency’s first crewed mission into deep space in more than 50 years.