Orion faces intense heat, communications failure and parachute descent before splashdown
Editor’s note: This is a developing story and will be updated later today.
Even if you’re one of the first people to go to the Moon in half a century, there’s no place like home.
Artemis II comes to an end of its historic lunar flyby. The Orion space capsule and its four astronauts are scheduled to land off the coast of San Diego on April 10 at 8:07 p.m. Eastern Time. NASA will stream the start of the school year live on its website starting at 6:30 p.m., as well as on half a dozen streaming services.
Re-entry into Earth’s atmosphere could give the Orion capsule its most grueling test yet. The capsule will touch the atmosphere for the first time since its launch at 7:53 p.m. at an altitude of approximately 122 kilometers and traveling at more than 38,000 kilometers per hour.
The overall flight plan is not that different from that of the Apollo missions, Artemis II flight director Jeff Radigan said during an April 9 press briefing. “Overall, coming back from the Moon is very close to the same thing,” he said. “It’s a lot more like Apollo than some of our returns to low Earth orbit.”
Shortly after re-entry begins, the crew will be out of contact with mission control for approximately six minutes. Friction from the atmosphere will heat Orion’s heat shield to 2,760° Celsius, creating a layer of superheated plasma that will block communication with the spacecraft.
NASA engineers will closely monitor the behavior of the heat shield. When the The Orion capsule of the Artemis I mission, without crew, returned to Earth in December 2022, the heat shield came back burned unexpectedly. Pieces of material were missing and other parts were cracked.
After extensive investigation, NASA announced in 2024 that the cause of carbonization was an accumulation of gases trapped beneath an outer layer of material called Avocado, designed to decompose and carry heat away from the spacecraft. Instead of redesigning the heat shield itself, NASA redesigned the spacecraft’s re-entry trajectory to reduce thermal stress on the shield.
At an altitude of 7.6 kilometers, Orion will deploy a series of 11 parachutes to slow it to around 30 km/h for splashdown. Once in the water, five orange airbags will fill with helium to help the capsule stay vertical and allow the astronauts to emerge onto a large raft called a porch. From there, the astronauts will return to Houston by helicopter, boat and plane.
“We have a lot of confidence in the system, in the heat shield, in the parachutes and in the recovery systems,” NASA Associate Administrator Amit Kshatriya said at the April 9 press conference. “The crew will dedicate their lives to this trust.”
