Artemis 2 comes home tonight with the same heat shield that shed pieces on its first flight.
At 8:07 p.m. Eastern on April 10, four astronauts will plunge back into Earth's atmosphere at 23,864 miles per hour aboard NASA's Orion capsule. Splashdown is targeted off the San Diego coast. The USS John P. Murtha will have the crew aboard within two hours.
The heat shield is the thing nobody wants to talk about in detail. On Artemis I, the uncrewed test flight in 2022, the Avcoat ablative material did not char off evenly. It chipped. NASA found divots and voids in the surface after recovery. NASA's Office of the Inspector General published photographs in May 2024 showing the damage up close: deep gouges in the thermal protection blocks, three of four separation bolts melted through. The OIG documented three failure modes that could kill the crew, including spalling that could expose the underlying structure, fragments striking the parachute compartment, and bolt erosion beyond acceptable limits.
NASA's answer was not a new heat shield. It was a different trajectory. For Artemis 2, the capsule will fly a "lofted" profile, holding at roughly 60 kilometers altitude longer to reduce peak heating. NASA says the analysis supports flying. "Our confidence is high," Amit Kshatriya, NASA's associate administrator for the Moon to Mars program, said at an April 9 briefing. He has also acknowledged briefing the crew on the heat shield problem from day one of their assignment.
according to the NASA blog, "They've been with us on the investigation, the production improvements, all the changes to entry procedures," Kshatriya said. "Tomorrow the crew is going to put their lives behind that confidence."
The reentry sequence is tightly choreographed. Service module separation happens at 7:33 p.m. Eastern, about 34 minutes before splashdown. The crew module raise burn fine-tunes the flight path, and roll maneuvers separate the capsule from the hardware that will burn up in the Pacific. Entry interface begins at 121.9 kilometers altitude, 13 minutes before splashdown. "That's when the fun really begins," said Rick Henfling, Artemis 2 entry flight director. A six-minute communications blackout follows as plasma forms around the capsule. The crew will experience up to 3.9 Gs of acceleration. Drogue parachutes deploy at 22,000 feet; three main parachutes unfurl around 6,000 feet, slowing the capsule to 32 kilometers per hour at splashdown.
Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, Christina Koch, and Jeremy Hansen have been in space nine days. They were supposed to take manual control of Orion for a piloting demonstration on the return leg. NASA canceled it. Not because of the heat shield, but because of a separate problem.
The propulsion system has a helium leak. Helium pressurizes the oxidizer lines feeding Orion's main engine and thrusters. Before launch, engineers knew the leak existed at a low rate. During the trans-lunar injection burn on day two of the mission, the rate climbed. "The leak rate we saw in flight is now an order of magnitude higher than what we saw on the ground," Kshatriya said. It is still within acceptable limits for this mission, which requires no complex propulsion maneuvers. It is not acceptable for a lunar orbit mission where full propulsion performance is non-negotiable. The valves are inside the European-built service module, which will be destroyed on reentry tonight. NASA spent part of the return leg gathering data it cannot collect any other way.
Kshatriya characterized the valve fix as a production redesign risk for Artemis 4, the first crewed lunar landing, currently planned for early 2028. Artemis 3, which was originally the crewed landing mission, has been restructured: in February 2026, the Trump administration redirected Artemis to fly more frequently with a crewed lunar landing assigned to Artemis 4. "I don't need those valves to hold pressure in the same way for a LEO orbiting mission, but for a lunar orbit mission, I do," Kshatriya said. He does not expect the valve redesign to take as long as the heat shield investigation.
Tonight's flight is the first crewed trip beyond low Earth orbit since Apollo 17 in December 1972. The heat shield problem should have been solved before any astronaut flew. It was not. NASA is flying the same capsule with a modified trajectory as its answer. Whether that answer holds is what tonight's reentry will determine.
If splashdown succeeds and the heat shield performs as the modified profile intends, the immediate question closes. The next one opens: whether the valve redesign can be executed on the schedule Artemis 4 demands. NASA will have about two years to find out.
