I'll be honest: this doesn't mean much. Back on the 28th, Space.com posted a "photo of the day" from the team that recovered the Artemis II Orion capsule. It was taken underwater the day of the recovery.
The Artemis 2 Orion heat shield underwater after splashdown on April 10, 2026. (Image credit: U.S. Navy) Some image processing by me to bring up the overall brightness of the image and get more of the shield to show up.
On this past Tuesday (April 28) the Orion capsule returned to the KSC. You can bet that we'll see better pictures of the heat shield once they get going.
Engineers and technicians will now begin "de-servicing operations" on Integrity at KSC's Multi-Processing Payload Facility, collecting data that could aid future Artemis missions to the moon.
De-servicing "includes removing payloads from the crew module, removing avionics boxes for reuse, and retrieving data on the spacecraft to better understand how it performed to inform procedures and plans for future Artemis missions," NASA officials said in an April 28 statement.
"Orion's heat shield and other elements will be removed for extensive analysis, and remaining hazards such as excess propellant will be offloaded," they added.
It will be very interesting to see how quickly the analyses will be released under Isaacman's administration.
ReplyDeleteAnd the real question is 'how much of Orion is reusable and how much will be replaced?'
After Apollo 20, the next gen of Apollo capsules were supposed to be between 80-90% reusable, only replacing things like science packages, seals, environmental components, recovery components and the heat shield. Basic structure, like the actual capsule, was to be reused.
Will Orion, right now being limited to, what, Artemis V, be 'mostly reusable' or are they building a mostly new capsule for the next few launches?
If I had to bet, I'd bet that reuse wasn't even a dream consideration to Orion, SLS or Artemis. Reuse might have been a nightmare - as in, "why would I do that when they pay me to throw away hardware?"
DeleteDoesn't the Orion date back to the Ares-1 stuff in the early 2000s?
Nasa, under Isaacman, never released the un redacted version of the fully redacted final report on the Artemis 1 heatshield; I have low confidence we will see anything more about Artemis 2.
ReplyDelete