The Silicon Graybeard

In the World of the High Tech Redneck, the Graybeard is the old guy who earned his gray by making all the mistakes, and tries to keep the young 'uns from repeating them. Silicon Graybeard is my term for an old hardware engineer; a circuit designer. The focus of this blog is on doing things, from radio to home machine shops and making all kinds of things, along with comments from a retired radio engineer, that run from tech, science or space news to economics; from firearms to world events.

Thursday, April 9, 2026

We're in the final 24 hours of Artemis 2

The crew is in the final hours of their mission, which will end Friday evening East Coast time, right around midnight UTC. From the running series of posts on Space.com:

Orion will begin its plunge through the atmosphere on Friday (April 10) at around 7:53 p.m. EDT (2353 GMT), entering a 6-minute communications blackout. The spacecraft's two parachute groups, its drogues and the main chutes, will deploy around 8:03 p.m. EDT (0003 GMT, April 11) and 8:04 p.m. EDT (0004 GMT, April 11), respectively, with splashdown expected at 8:07 p.m. EDT (0007 GMT, April 11).

Like everyone who has been on such a historic mission, they haven't really had everything they've been through sink in to their heads. Buzz Aldrin famously went through this after Apollo 11 and being the second person to step on the moon in human history. After something that big, how do you return to an ordinary life?

"I wanted to resume my duties, but there were no duties to resume," Aldrin said in his book. "There was no goal, no sense of calling, no project worth pouring myself into."

Tomorrow brings a big test that I think many of us have been fearing.

I think all of you who follow the space program know about the heat shield issues that Artemis 1 had, with holes essentially scattered around the entire heat shield. This has been tested about as well as it could be tested without a "disposable" Artemis mission throwing away an SLS booster to get an Orion capsule on the intended trajectory at the right speed so it could be tested under the worst case conditions. The results were approved by NASA Chief Jared Isaacman just three months ago.

The Orion heat shield as seen after the Artemis I flight. Credit: NASA

There has been mention in a couple of places of a task for this mission of putting instruments in positions that can track the Orion capsule during reentry to capture images of it. It might reveal details about the reentry that other instruments can't or won't.

Reentry is always a scary time in a mission. Some reentries are scarier than other. Godspeed, Artemis 2!