NASA's Orion Space Capsule Is Flaming Garbage

For many years, readers have asked me a simple question:

“Casey, why do you hate the SLS so much? Don’t you also hate Orion?”

Yes, yes I do. But life is finite and my heart is mostly filled with love, and so I held off in the hope that either someone else would step forth and deliver a blistering tirade, or perhaps Orion would finally succumb to the magnitude of its contradictions and die a mostly peaceful death, unlike the astronauts who are fated to roll the dice in this thing this year. I mean next year. Well, at any rate probably before they die of natural causes in old age.

Here is a brief summary of previous posts on the SLS+Orion program. Prior to this point I’ve reserved most of my critique for SLS. And for new readers of this blog, you’ll find that 98% of my writing is technical, positive, and I hope interesting. But someone has to write a pointed critique every now and then. 

February 24, 2021, during the opening days of the Biden administration, I wrote “SLS: Is cancellation too good?” (No, no it’s not). This post made quite a splash. Numerous insiders reached out to confirm and elaborate parts of the story. The ongoing failure of the program is hard to disguise, after all. I have it on good authority that the post was read by NASA center directors and within the White House, but I will not be more specific on this front. 

October 2, 2024, SLS had still not been canceled so I wrote an update, elaborating on the intervening four years of failure and waste and editorializing on the contagion afflicting NASA’s technical integrity (a problem that Orion also contributes to) as a result of the futility of the program. “SLS is still a national disgrace”. My blog’s readership having swelled considerably in the intervening years, this post also did the rounds. 

January 17, 2025, during the last days of the Biden administration, I wrote a post on organizational failure modes that afflict high conscientiousness organizations, and christened it Dittemore’s Law after the Shuttle flight director whose fateful call sealed the fate of the seven astronauts who perished in the Columbia disaster. 

By June 12, 2025, with Jared Isaacman’s nomination to NASA director stalled and China’s lunar program accelerating towards a human landing in late 2029 (just 1400 days away at the time of writing) I wrote “NASA is worth saving” to present the affirmative case on the fate of NASA, even as many previous champions seemed to have lost either faith or hope. The venerable organization, founded in 1958 to uphold the mantle of Freedom in the space domain and demonstrate the superiority of American technology over Soviet, is literally crumbling before our eyes. A series of acute stressors under the Trump administration is revealing the depth of chronic issues that have festered for decades. I am far from certain that NASA can regain anything like the vigor necessary to respond decisively to the Chinese threat, but I am determined that the free people of Earth not live under a Red Moon for the rest of eternity.

Finally, the usual caveats apply. I used to work for NASA. I was treated decently enough. I represent only my own opinions as of today. My purpose here is to entertain, inform, and motivate. Lockheed isn’t Boeing but even so, I am not and have never been suicidal, I have 3 (soon to be 4!) children, and I intend to live a long and productive life. I provide no warranty that my calculations can be relied on for the safe navigation of human-occupied space craft in deep space, but in general I’m pretty good at math. As you will see, this post is generally not a personal critique of individuals who may have spent a good part of their entire career working on this, though in my experience very few people who are working on it actually believe the program and mission is as good as the paycheck they cash every two weeks. 

Some disambiguation and a bit of history.

By Orion, I am referring to the Orion Capsule currently being developed by Lockheed Martin for the Artemis Program. It has been in development since 2006, originally begun under the Presidency of George W Bush as the Crew Exploration Vehicle for the Constellation program. Literally my entire adult life. Duke Nukem Forever took only 14 years. You can make a whole new fully qualified engineer from conception to graduation in less time. One of my challenges in writing this piece is that the program is so old a lot of the primary sources are now affected by link rot, and I’ve had to resort to using Internet Archive snapshots!

Orion can also refer to a nuclear bomb powered spacecraft proposed by Freeman Dyson, and an orbital debris sweeping space laser. While neither of these projects has ever been built or operated, neither has also consumed more than $30b.

Speaking of which, this is as good a place as any to dive in.

Orion is absurdly expensive to build and operate

According to Wikipedia, the Orion program has already burned through over $30b.

For your reference, by expense alone, SpaceX would have shipped Crew Dragon by 2008, before Obama was elected. Going by schedule, even Boeing’s irredeemably broken Starliner capsule would have flown by 2018.

This chart shows (inflation adjusted) budget and schedule for six US capsules, along with uncrewed and crewed flight timing. It’s pretty clear which of the modern capsules has achieved product market fit. 

Crew Dragon’s first flight was in 2020. Artemis II will attempt to repeat the Apollo 8 mission of 1968 – a flight around the Moon and splash down on Earth. But if all we want to do is fly around the Moon and back, a lightly modified Crew Dragon on Falcon Heavy could have done this at any point since 2020. We could do it today, or tomorrow. It wouldn’t mean very much in the context of the ongoing Chinese land rush, but it could be executed for well under $500m if SpaceX was cooperative – roughly equivalent to a single month of burn on the SLS and Orion programs. That is, for the same budget, we could fly a crew around the Moon every month indefinitely. 
In fact, according to the NASA OIG, Orion’s additional marginal cost for launch is $1b. I’m not even sure how you could find $1b worth of things to do and spend on a relatively small capsule. What’s it made of, pure gold? The Navy, for example, even in its modern and bloated state, can manage to build most of a fast attack nuclear submarine for just the marginal launch cost of the Orion capsule!

A Dragon+Falcon Heavy stunt is probably superfluous, as SpaceX is focused on the Human Landing System (HLS) via Starship. In addition to Falcon Heavy, Vulcan or New Glenn would also be capable of a similar mission. In other words, Artemis I was a decade plus overdue unmanned test of an obsolete capsule that still managed to cost over $5b and generated enough adverse data that it’s going to take four years to even get to the next $5b test flight. For that time and money, any number of hungry new space companies or even foreign space programs could develop an entirely new capsule and rocket from scratch. 

To recap, Orion, which has flown in flight configuration (except for large parts of the life support system, which will be tested for the first time on the Artemis II mission with four astronauts in deep space for a week) exactly one time (2022) has taken four times longer and cost six times more to develop than Crew Dragon. This is not a directly fair comparison, since Crew Dragon is already a seasoned operational vehicle with a functional heatshield that is delivered well within mass margins, but we do our best.

The irony of Orion’s decades of profligacy is that recently the news has been full of (Acting NASA Administrator) Secretary Duffy’s complaints that the Human Landing System (HLS) program has been progressing too slowly. Unlike SLS and Orion, which might one day manage to repeat a mission we first flew almost sixty years ago and which commercial providers could do for 1% of the cost this year, the HLS program is doing the hard part (actually landing on the Moon and then flying back) with less than $3b and has been in active development only since 2021.

This concept seems difficult for some to grasp so I prepared the following infographic to make the situation clearer.

This one might help too. 

Orion and SLS have burned through nearly $100b to date. If I took $100b in $20 bills and stapled them end to end, they would run from my office, down the hall, out the front door, down the drive, onto the road, onto the ramp, down the local freeway, past the crumbling remnants of JPL, up the mountain, then up into the sky, through the troposphere, past the space station, between 10,000 Starlink satellites, past geostationary orbit (my string of bills is now longer than a space elevator!), all the way to the Moon, around the entire lunar equator, between all the legs of all the lunar landers of all the missions that have landed there, then all the way back to the Earth, through the atmosphere, down the mountain, down the road, through my front door, and back to my desk. At the present rate of NASA’s budget, additional bill consumption, stapling, and ejection from my office desk would break the speed of sound. 

The Orion capsule is far too heavy to be useful

One of the reasons the Augustine Committee advocated for the cancellation of Orion in the first place way back in 2009 is that it had become obvious that success, even then, was not in the set of possible outcomes. One of the reasons for this was that the Ares V, the spiritual predecessor of the current SLS, lacked the power necessary to launch the specified capsule mass plus the Altair lunar lander to the Moon. 

It’s actually more complicated than this because Orion was originally meant to fly on Ares I, a rocket that combined all the scariest components of Shuttle and which flew just one time, unsuccessfully, before someone realized that a launch abort would be impossible without the SRB debris shredding the parachutes. Seriously team, don’t use solid fuel with human cargo. 

The moment when Ares I-X smashed the upper stage during staging, which was approximately the sixth worst thing about this rocket, which also damaged the launch tower, subjected the crew capsule to shocking levels of vibration, and carried a launch escape system despite the fact that, like SLS, the most likely launch failure mode involves filling the sky with supersonic chunks of burning ammonium perchlorate.

NASA awarded Lockheed Martin what became the Orion contract on August 31, 2006. By early 2007, excessive growth in weight had already been flagged as a problem. According to NASA whistleblower Joshua Foxworth, Lockheed was unable to internally provide any mathematical basis for the weights and balances used in its Orion Preliminary Design Review in late 2008. 

Constant changes to weights continued to occur throughout the duration of the program, resulting in a total capsule launch weight (including launch escape system) of over 33 T, almost as much as a 737 airliner. By comparison, the launch (wet) mass of the Crew Dragon capsule is just 12.5 T, while the Apollo command/service module weighed almost 29 T, of which a large fraction was fuel and other expendables to sustain and transport the spacecraft to and from the Moon. 

That seems almost impossible, but here’s the mass breakdown from Wikipedia. Just the launch abort system weighs 7 T, as much as the entire Soyuz module. 

Back in about 2009, NASA unironically sought to address uncontrolled mass budget growth for Orion by constricting its requirements on astronaut height and weight. If we’re in the business of running a Berlin Airlift to the Moon, I don’t think astronaut weight is going to be material to the enterprise. 

Originally, the Constellation version of Orion was to ship with a powerful service module with delta V (1500-1800 m/s) comparable to the Apollo spacecraft (2800 m/s), but this died in the cancellation of Constellation. It was replaced with the European Service Module, a glorified satellite bus with barely enough delta V (1450 m/s) to perform a LEO de-orbit burn, and nowhere near enough to get into, and out of, low Lunar orbit. 

In this case, the hilariously underpowered ESM is not an artifact of European hair shirt environmentalism but a preposterously restricted mass budget resulting from SLS underperformance and Orion bloat. You might be forgiven for thinking that because SLS is big like the Saturn V, there is also room somewhere in the fairing for a lunar lander, like in Apollo, but you’d be wrong. The mass budget on SLS for a lunar lander is 0 kg. I’ve trawled through the (public) archives in search of internal NASA documentation raising the flag that deleting the lunar lander on a lunar landing rocket might be an oversight, but have thus far found nothing. If you have a document, I’d be keen to review it. With a launch rate of one per two years, it’s not like another SLS could launch a different lunar lander.

From an anthropological point of view the SLS and Orion are a fascinating set of artifacts, living embodiments of a mentality that supposes that a lunar landing would be possible if only the Moon were a little bit closer and had zero surface gravity. If only. 

This isn’t a place for a math lesson, but I really cannot overemphasize that things that fly have to restrict their mass in an almost vicious manner, and this is doubly true for things that fly in space. For $3b per year, NASA’s contractors could not employ fewer than 26520 people, enough that we could have one whole engineer per kilogram of the entire 26520 kg system. On marginal launch cost alone, we’re paying $200,000/kg, enough to justify spending an entire annual salary to eliminate something that weighs less than the largest cup of coffee Starbucks will sell you.

The Congressional pork memes almost write themselves.

(Okay, he is cute though.)

Enough talking around this subject. Design choices have consequences. Even for $5.2b per launch, Orion is so overweight that there does not exist a booster nor an upper stage that can launch it to Low Lunar Orbit and return it to Earth. That is, NASA spent $31b on a capsule and $60b on a Moon rocket that is so overweight it can’t even reach the Moon, a fact that has been undeniable since 2009.

Whoops, I guess?

Wrong Mission 

This is as good a place as any to dispose of the notion that it’s not NASA or Lockheed’s fault that their Moon rocket can’t actually reach the Moon, even though everyone involved has known this since the very beginning. “Congress forced this design on us.” I hear it every damn day. Congresspeople are not rocket scientists. They have a lot of things to do. They routinely pass laws calling for NASA to do things that are more or less impossible. Who is going to tell them? Me or the NASA Administrator? Give me a break! “Congress forced us” is a weak excuse at the best of times, but when we’re looking for someone to blame for losing badly to China, anyone who said this will be a good start. The failure of SLS is a team effort, and it lays bare NASA’s ever-weakening claim to any form of technical integrity. Well done, everyone!

NASA has been unable to completely avoid the fact that their Moon rocket and Orion capsule can’t actually reach the Moon, so to paper over this inconvenient truth they’ve attempted to sell us on a Lunar Gateway. This plan is so brilliant I wish I had thought of it. It goes something like this.

The Moon rocket can’t reach the Moon? No problem. We’ll put a space station half way, call it a Gateway or a Stepping Stone or a Trip Wire or some other cliche, and then we’ll build another entirely different rocket system with a bunch of money Congress will never give us to go the rest of the way, orbital mechanics be damned. Congress loves space stations though. Never mind that the Chinese don’t have to deal with this nonsense.

Of course, there was never any internal plan to finish the job. Here’s 434 pages of NASA talking around the subject last year without getting anywhere. At the 11th hour, the commercial (and moderately successful) part of human spaceflight got the HLS contract over the line, but with that came an implicit assumption. If a contractor was capable of delivering an entire human landing system to Gateway, and from there to the Moon, and then back to Gateway, and then back to Earth, then the contractor’s system could bypass Gateway completely, transporting humans from LEO to the Moon and back. SpaceX has all but explicitly stated their preference to delete the Gateway speedbump from their architecture, and in the current situation NASA is in no position to dictate terms. 

The only piece missing would be a heat-shielded capsule, such as Dragon, that could transport the human crew back to the Earth from Lunar return trajectories. As it happens, the only potentially useful part of the legacy SLS+Orion+Gateway system, Orion’s heat shield, is fundamentally flawed anyway, as we shall see. So, in sum, for any real mission to any real objective, SLS and Orion are not only suboptimal, they’re entirely superfluous. Delete!

Orion is not just expensive and heavy. It’s also a capsule to nowhere, designed without reference to any mission architecture that resembles our actual solar system. I remember watching a senior NASA program manager (Gerst?) in an interview in about 2013 respond to a question about Orion’s lack of a design reference mission. “Is this a good way to run a space program?” “No!” but I’ve been unable to find the primary source. If you do, send it over!

Let’s look in detail at NASA’s Artemis reference architecture.

This chart shows how NASA’s default plan requires five launches of 3-4 different rockets, including the SLS which is actually more like $5.2b per shot all up, to ferry the crew to NRHO – something they could easily do with any of the other elements, deleting the most expensive and dangerous part all together. In addition, the plan requires not one, not two, but at least five separate space craft: The Gateway (multiple pieces), the transfer stage, descent stage, ascent stage, and Orion. This is NASA’s ticket to a financially sustainable permanent lunar presence?

“Since the contract was awarded, we have been consistently responsive to NASA as requirements for Artemis III have changed and have shared ideas on how to simplify the mission to align with national priorities. In response to the latest calls, we’ve shared and are formally assessing a simplified mission architecture and concept of operations that we believe will result in a faster return to the Moon while simultaneously improving crew safety.”

I don’t have inside knowledge but I strongly suspect SpaceX would propose a Starship-only architecture, as it allows the concentration of maximum firepower on the most enabling component – spamming enormous quantities of mass at the Moon. 

Elon seems to agree.

Heat shield

Orion may be comically expensive, desperately in need of Ozempic, behind schedule, and pretty much useless but at least it’s not a death trap like the Shuttle, right? Right?

Unfortunately, I do not believe this to be the case.

Since before its first cancellation, Orion’s heat shield has been controversial. While SpaceX chose to develop the newer and more capable PICA for its capsule heatshield, Orion instead opted to use AVCOAT, the same material used in Apollo.

Only, unlike Apollo, Orion relies on an updated formulation that reduces use of spectacularly carcinogenic resin additives, but at least initially maintained the highly labor intensive process of manually injecting the epoxy-like fluid into tens of thousands of honeycomb pockets machined into a stainless steel structural backing layer. 

In 2014, NASA flew Orion on a Delta IV Heavy for a high energy heat shield test, finding cracking issues.

So the design was changed to use instead molded blocks that were then assembled into the heat shield.

Unlike Apollo, which flew multiple unmanned test flights on a quick cadence to qualify designs, NASA didn’t refly Orion until late 2022, eight years after the first flight. How much staff churn had occurred by then? I would be shocked if more than 10% of the technical design and assembly crew maintained continuity over this time.

After the Artemis I 2022 test, NASA remained very tight-lipped about heat shield performance, and managed to obstruct investigative journalists from learning the truth for more than two years. Why do you think this was? 

The updated heat shield design, after more than 14 years of development, had performed even worse. There was unexpected char loss and more than 100 chipped areas, with pits far deeper than expected.

The capsule survived re-entry and was recovered. Any astronauts on board would have been fine, probably. But unexpected failures are not something from which safety can be derived, even if they didn’t result in total catastrophe. 

After Challenger was lost, Nobel prize winning physicist Richard Feynman contributed to the accident investigation and wrote.

“In spite of these variations from case to case, officials behaved as if they understood it, giving apparently logical arguments to each other often depending on the “success” of previous flights. For example. in determining if flight 51-L was safe to fly in the face of ring erosion in flight 51-C, it was noted that the erosion depth was only one-third of the radius. It had been noted in an [F2] experiment cutting the ring that cutting it as deep as one radius was necessary before the ring failed. Instead of being very concerned that variations of poorly understood conditions might reasonably create a deeper erosion this time, it was asserted, there was “a safety factor of three.” This is a strange use of the engineer’s term ,”safety factor.” If a bridge is built to withstand a certain load without the beams permanently deforming, cracking, or breaking, it may be designed for the materials used to actually stand up under three times the load. This “safety factor” is to allow for uncertain excesses of load, or unknown extra loads, or weaknesses in the material that might have unexpected flaws, etc. If now the expected load comes on to the new bridge and a crack appears in a beam, this is a failure of the design. There was no safety factor at all; even though the bridge did not actually collapse because the crack went only one-third of the way through the beam. The O-rings of the Solid Rocket Boosters were not designed to erode. Erosion was a clue that something was wrong. Erosion was not something from which safety can be inferred.”

Since 2022, NASA and Lockheed have changed the heat shield design again. Before understanding the root cause of spalling in 2022, which turned out to have been caused by offgassing in the resin binder exceeding the tensile strength of the material, NASA had also been concerned by potential delamination of the blocks from their stainless steel backing, and had altered the AVCOAT formula yet again to make it easier to ultrasonically inspect any one of these 186 blocks for damage prior to launch.

Unfortunately, this formula change will exacerbate the thermal offgassing and spalling issue. By how much, it is impossible to say without another flight test, which will cost another $5.2b plus four years of $3b/year development cost. So $17b? 

Just so we’re keeping score, NASA and Lockheed are going to spend four times the total development cost of Crew Dragon and six times the total cost of the HLS contract on their third attempt to successfully build a capsule heatshield using a technology humans have had for more than sixty years, and which other parts of NASA have successfully deployed on Earth, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Titan! 

Only now we’re finally up against the wall on schedule here, so NASA plans to run the third Orion heatshield test as part of Artemis II, with four astronauts on board. Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, Christina Koch, and Jeremy Hanson, who have decided to name their spacecraft “Integrity,” will be human guinea pigs for this two decade exercise in profligate waste and shockingly poor program management. 

I am genuinely concerned for their safety. Last month, I pointed out the irony of naming a vehicle whose technical integrity and critical heat shield integrity held the lives of the crew, Integrity. 

When NASA finally got around to releasing public information about the Artemis I heat shield, they reported that their technical review committee had robustly debated the merits of the Artemis II design change but ultimately agreed unanimously that the risk could be dispositioned by changing the re-entry trajectory to reduce peak heat load. 

Immediately two members of the review board came forward denying that they had agreed, underscoring a pattern of half truths and outright lies that have plagued this program from the very beginning. Charles Camarda, a former Shuttle astronaut and expert on heat shields who has recently published a book on NASA’s ongoing cultural challenges around safety and truth, wrote that senior NASA leadership should be ashamed. I’m inclined to agree. Leadership isn’t leadership unless it hurts, and the Orion team evidently needs to be given a hard “no” once in a while. 

Don’t believe me, review NASA’s IRT report of August 2024 yourself. 

Yikes!

Last December, I wrote:

NASA decides to fly the Artemis II heat shield as is, saying a) modifying the re-entry profile should mitigate the risk, b) their review board agreed unanimously on this course of action and c) the flight will be delayed another 8 months ($3b of runway) to 2026. However, additional reporting revealed that the heat shield design was modified since Artemis I to make ultrasound verification of the hull-shield bond easier, inadvertently accentuating the design flaw which prevents exsolved gasses from diffusing out of the shield, leading to cracking and spalling. Additionally, Charlie Camarda, a retired astronaut who specialized in heat shields, stated that there were at least two dissenting voices on the review board. To me, this looks like NASA spent nearly three years manufacturing a technical justification to do exactly what they wanted to do anyway.

Pencil whipping is an industry term of art for the process by which enough intermediators brandishing clipboards are brought in to gradually launder a “hell no” from engineering into a “A-OK!” from technical management. It was cited as a key cause of the Deepwater Horizon disaster. 

It’s common enough in the history of aviation that falsifying maintenance records can get you a free vacation courtesy of the Department of Justice for several years. 

Crash site of Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302, the second crash in six months of the brand new Boeing 737-MAX, who later admitted that the crash was caused not by “third world pilots” but by their undocumented FCAS outsourced software hack about which they’d deliberately deceived the regulator. 

In 1986, Morton Thiokol engineers including Roger Boisjoly initially warned that overnight freezing temperatures would compromise seals in the solid rocket booster that were already known to be performing below spec. Morton Thiokol management asked to briefly meet separately from NASA program oversight, systematically asked every dissenting engineer to leave the room, then got back on the line to report that everyone in the room was unanimous that the launch could go ahead. Minutes later, millions of school children watched teacher and first “non professional” astronaut Christa McAuliffe, along with her six fellow astronauts, explode like a firework in the upper atmosphere and plunge into the Atlantic Ocean. 

17 years later, after many years of ignoring tile damage caused by broken foam, Columbia’s luck ran out, killing another seven astronauts after nearly 16 days on orbit. 

It didn’t work for Halliburton. It didn’t work for Boeing. It didn’t work for Challenger. It didn’t work for Columbia. NASA needs to stop pencil whipping fractally, axiomatically compromised systems. Enough is enough! 

All this would be inexplicable enough if, indeed, AVCOAT was the only known material from which heat shields could be built. But while Lockheed continues to soak the US taxpayer and play chicken with the lives of NASA’s astronauts with this “flight proven” (but completely different) design, Lockheed happily built a PICA heat shield for JPL’s large Mars rovers Curiosity and Perseverance, and SpaceX’s Dragon capsule also uses PICA-3.

Why is Lockheed building a worse heat shield from an inferior material with more parts at vastly inflated cost for a capsule that, unlike the Mars rovers, will literally hold the life of four heroes in its tender clutches? 

How the hell would I know?

We’re done here

Orion is far too expensive, too slow, too heavy, fundamentally flawed, unsafe, unfit for purpose. I’m calling it. Success is no longer in the set of possible outcomes, and hasn’t been for well over a decade. Let’s stop pretending. 

If Lockheed had managed to develop Orion on time and budget, with well designed and functional internal systems, perhaps it would have had a grand career ferrying astronauts to and from the space station, and perhaps even on a few trips around the Moon. Perhaps NASA would not have been left with an eight year capability gap requiring dependency on, and enormous corrupt transfer payments to, our geopolitical adversary Russia even as they continued their lawless extraterratorial adventurism in South Ossetia, Abkhazia, and Ukraine. By now, with the arrival of Dragon and Starship, this mature capsule with dozens of flights under its belt would be heading for an honorable retirement.

Instead, the greed and disinterest of NASA’s prime contractor and its overseers in NASA doomed this project from the very start. The only saving grace is that it has progressed so slowly that it has not yet had the opportunity to kill another of NASA’s astronaut crews. 

It may surprise you to learn that, after 20 years of development and before a single operational flight, it is now NASA’s official policy that both the SLS and Orion should be canceled. But, for some reason, not until after Artemis III, the first human moon landing since 1972. If you’re keeping score at home, this is the second cancellation after the second Augustine Commission recommended ending Constellation.

Why, I wonder, should we shovel another $3.2b/year into this program for as long as it takes to fail to ship a functional product? If Orion’s manifold failures are so evident today that both the executive and NASA leadership have lost faith in flying the capsule with crew just twice and barely four times in total, why not cancel it today?

That’s right, the official policy of the United States of America is to take the $31b we’ve already spent on Orion and the $4b or so more we’ll spend on it in the next few years, plus the $60b or so we’ll spend on SLS and fly a total of 8 people in space for about 10 days each. That is well over $1b per human space day, or something like 300 times more expensive than the already exorbitant ISS operations budget. Ignoring sunk costs and taking into account only the money that would be saved if this entire sorry debacle was shuttered immediately, we would still be spending well over $100m per person per day by the time SLS and Orion launch four astronauts half way to the Moon, then hand them over to a modern, capable HLS spacecraft to finish the job. It takes true creativity to waste this much money on something so useless and dangerous. 

NASA cannot justify so brazenly and pointlessly risking the lives of astronauts on the SLS+Orion death trap.

But wait, there’s more

Why stop now? We’re having so much fun. Like my SLS post, I am motivated by the observation that there does not yet seem to be a fully comprehensive list of project failures related to Orion. Even Wikipedia appears to have been scrubbed. Never fear, I’ll go into some detail here. I am, however, quite certain that I’m barely scratching the surface. Let me know what I’ve missed!

Separation bolts

In addition to unexpected heat shield damage on Artemis I in 2022, NASA subsequently found that the separation bolts that attach Orion to the European Service Module had unexpected levels of erosion, as reported in the May 2024 NASA OIG report and also by Jeff Foust at Space News. 

Part of the challenge of the bolts is that after separation, the metallic structure penetrates through the AVCOAT heat shield. As a metal, its thermal conductivity, melting point, and coefficient of thermal expansion are markedly different from the refractory heat shield. In Artemis I, three of the four bolts experienced greater than expected “gapping” and intrusion of hot plasma, further compromising the heat shield. 

Heat shields are non-trivial. We’ve seen that with SpaceX’s struggles to prevent flap damage on Starship test flights, not to mention the loss of Columbia and the near-loss of STS-27 back in 1988. 

Unlike Starship, which is intentionally pushed to failure during the rapid and capital-efficient development of its transformational capabilities, NASA and Lockheed were not expecting the Orion heat shield to break, either by spalling or by excessive bolt erosion. This failure tells us nothing except that the model of reality employed in Lockheed’s Orion engineering practice does not conform with actual reality. In my view, this is excusable for a student project. It’s not acceptable for NASA’s flagship manned Moon rocket. 

You would think that after 20 years of development they would have left no stone unturned, no design feature unchecked, and had enough time to do the math correctly. But in my experience, speed often correlates with excellence, because it forces pragmatic design choices and extrudes incompetence from the organization.

As of 2024, NASA’s plan was to mitigate the problem for Artemis II with extra AVCOAT shims and later redesign the part for later capsules? About eight remain under construction despite the current plan to delete the entire program after no more than two more flights. 

I don’t even want to think about how NASA program management is going to accidentally-on-purpose bungle the cancellation penalty negotiation. We may well end up spending more just getting Lockheed to go away than we have on the entire commercial space program, cargo, crew, CLPS, HLS, everything. It would still be worth it. Every day we spend on this thing is a day those engineers waste their talent and passion on a dead end project. 

Service Module Problems

As outlined above, the profligate weight growth of Orion and underperformance of SLS squeezed the service module to the point where it simply could not carry enough fuel to be useful, with less than 1450 m/s of delta V, significantly less than the barest minimum 1640 m/s required to insert from trans-Lunar injection (TLI) to low Lunar orbit (LLO) and then depart via trans-Earth injection (TEI). Apollo had about 2500 m/s of delta V, enough to also bring the lunar lander from TLI into LLO and have some margin for course corrections. 

So we delve into the archives and bring you NASA OIG report IG-16-029, released September 6, 2016. Back then, if you can believe it, everyone maintained they were just two years from EM-1 (Artemis I), which actually flew six years later. 

The problem identified as the key schedule risk was ESA’s prime contractor, Airbus Defense and Space, responsible for delivering the ESM, and then running a few months late. I don’t know when the ESM was actually shipped but delivering anything related to the Orion program within three months of schedule is worthy of a medal! 

The ESM uses the AJ10 engine (26 kN thrust) for propulsion, previously variants were used as the Shuttle’s intermediate thrust OMS engine, the Apollo service module’s primary engine, and indeed was first flown in 1958 when it launched Vanguard 1 into orbit. Plenty of flight heritage, but also nearly 70 years old and not as efficient or light as modern engines. The primary problem with a lower thrust engine (relative to the payload mass) is that impulsive manoeuvres take longer, depriving missions of the full benefit of the Oberth effect.

Complicating matters, Aerojet itself has endured an avalanche of mergers, consolidations, relocations, layoffs, and is but a shadow of its former self, driving NASA to award a $270m contract in 2021 to improve production and to issue an RFI in 2020 for a new design for Artemis 7+, though what are the chances anything related to Orion is flying by then? Either way, Aerojet is getting over $100m per engine that NASA already owns just to refurbish them. 

This may seem astonishingly generous, but then the same contractor is getting $420m per engine to refurbish NASA’s dwindling supply of the SSME engines that power the SLS core stage. Nice work if you can get it. You, specifically, can’t get it. This kind of hand out isn’t for regular people. 

For your reference, SpaceX spent less than $400m developing and building the entire Falcon 9 rocket, including its industry leading Merlin 1D engines and the reuse hardware that has seen this platform launch 140 times this year, with two months still to go. The entire rocket platform that single handedly upholds US interests in space, primarily privately funded and operated, for less than NASA gives their buddies at Aerojet to refurbish one engine that NASA already paid to develop and build decades ago. It’s outrageous! 

Artemis I, II, and III have flown/will fly with reconditioned Shuttle OMS engines to sidestep the lack of a current supply chain, which will likely cost over $1b to restart. Supposedly it was cheaper, faster and easier to use these ancient flight heritage components, but it hasn’t worked out.

By comparison, SpaceX spent about $800m developing their entire Cargo Dragon, which had a window and a life support system. 

We live in a world where Lockheed/Boeing/Aerojet/Bechtel/Northrop Grumman get 90% of your tax-funded space largesse, and SpaceX delivers 90% global market share. We could be playing baseball on the Moon by now!

One more thing. In 2017 it emerged that the Shuttle OMS engine valving, which was rated to 250 psi, was failing at the Orion’s ESM pressure of 300-350 psi. I’m sure there were valid reasons for increasing the propellant pressure, but this does, again, undermine the assumption that validated flight heritage hardware is faster and easier to use. 

I’m sensing a pattern here. A certain whiff of Powerpoint engineering. For some inscrutable reason NASA chose to build the Orion service module around an obsolete engine no longer in production, with sharply limited supply, in such poor condition, that they had to give nearly a billion dollars to the contractor Aerojet to get them ready for flight, after which valves and seals had their usual problems, and the engine performance had to be derated even further. 

I really struggle to imagine a more rankly incompetent acquisition strategy. I am not sure whether it is more stupid or more evil. I decline to adjudicate.

ECLSS problems

The Environmental Control and Life Support System has an easily-defined job. Maintain temperature, pressure, and air quality in the capsule. They are quite hard to engineer correctly on the first try, as was found on the USS Nautilus during initial sea trials (amine contamination), the Shuttle first flight (temperature, extreme gas from H2 dissolved in the onboard water supply) and more recently Starliner’s first flight (extreme cold). 

The most recent Augustine report “NASA at a Crossroads” spends hundreds of pages setting up a dichotomy between NASA’s allegedly underfunded flagship programs and their glacial progress. If we want real progress, we are told, we need to turn on the infinite money tap. 

You can ctrl+f through the entire document for “productivity” at your leisure, it does not come up a single time. One might think that NASA, purportedly the inventor of so much of the technology that drove the 20th century, would be the tip of the spear of US total factor productivity (TFP) growth. One might think…

Despite burning around $1.3b per year for 20 years, the Orion program is perpetually on the verge of bankruptcy and never seems to have enough resources to make progress. No doubt Lockheed program managers agree with Norm Augustine (who was Lockheed’s CEO from 1995 until 1997 and remained on the board until 2005) that with only $1.3b per year they really have to search through the couch cushions to find enough money to make payroll. 

Not to worry, though. Unlike Mercury/Gemini/Apollo, which performed multiple crewed tests in LEO where bailing out was an option, Artemis II will perform a lunar fly-by on a free return trajectory with essentially zero wiggle room for any kind of ECLSS failure. Once the TLI burn is complete, Orion cannot return until gravity brings it back about a week later. We’ve already gotten absurdly lucky once with Apollo 13, which was an unbelievably close call. In a counterfactual world with any of a dozen minor variations (such as the accident occurring mere hours before or after it did), everyone on board would have died. Watch the press conference given by the crew after their safe return! 

In August 2023, the Orion program found an electrical fault that affects the valves which remove CO2 from the crew cabin. Like much else on Orion, the relevant wiring harnesses were designed with zero reference to manufacturability and may not even be accessible in the finished article. 

It’s one thing to rush a space capsule like Soyuz 11 in 1971, and end up with a critical component (a cabin depressurization valve) faulting while being unreachable behind a seat in the seconds the crew had to diagnose and fix the problem (they all died). It’s quite another to endure yet another 12 month delay, costing billions of additional dollars, because of a chance discovery of a critical electrical error whose silent failure would have suffocated everyone on the space craft, in a part of the capsule that’s not only unmaintainable in flight but also inaccessible even to expert technical crews on the ground. 

There’s a reason that submarines expose their wiring and pipes within passageways – accessibility, inspectability, maintainability. About 1000 submarines have been lost in the course of history – many due to attack, and many due to technical failures. Something has been learned!

Hatches that won’t open

OIG report IG-24-011 mentions that the Orion Program is working to correct a seven year issue with the side hatch, which is used for crew access prior to launch and after landing. This hatch, apparently since 2017, does not have a valve for pressure equalization, which can make opening it very difficult. NASA recognizes this is a problem because a similar design flaw killed three astronauts in the Apollo 1 fire. 

You might not think that adding a depressurization poppet valve would take seven years, but you’d be wrong. You might think that seven years was much longer than the total development time of every other capsule that has successfully flown humans in space, and you’d be right.

But seven years might be optimistic. According to NASA whistleblower Joshua Foxworth, he worked on the side hatch design in 2009! The design was based on the Gemini hatch, which was kept in a store room in the basement, and by his account had been scaled up by about a factor of two, without actually doing any loads or math calculation. This resulted in design failure, in which the hatch would be unable to handle the increased forces from increased size. And this was after the Preliminary Design Review in which Lockheed alleged to its NASA managers that this detailed design and qualification had been completed successfully, then cashed their performance bonus worth hundreds of millions of dollars. By the time Joshua joined the program, Lockheed had already spent more on Orion than the total value of the SpaceX HLS award, and NASA had awarded Lockheed management performance bonuses greater than NASA’s total contribution to Falcon 9 development, which was occurring at the same time. 

If you’re keeping score at home, Lockheed has been mis-engineering the side hatch for 15 years, longer than it took NASA to form, and then run all of Mercury/Gemini/Apollo to the launch of Skylab. In fact, Gemini went from first contract to first manned flight in 2.5 years, and the program was complete within five years. If Marshall Space Flight Center could design and build the original hatch in less than a year in 1959, why does it take Lockheed 15 years to make a shoddy copy of this hatch in 2025?

It was during this process that Joshua first made a critical mistake I would later make at JPL – solving a problem too quickly. Understanding that requirements were still somewhat fluid, Joshua executed standard engineering practice and generated a parametric design. This is essentially a large spreadsheet in which numerical requirements are inserted, loads, sizing etc automatically calculated, and then key results fed into a connected CAD model, autonomously generating an updated design. This is not state of the art technology, Thomas J. Kelly at Grumman employed a similar change management system on the Apollo Lunar Lander, which as a result was able to design and ship in time for the 1969 landing, and whose 15 articles continually incorporated significant upgrades, which enabled, for example, the expansion of the cargo capacity and the bringing of the lunar rover in the last three landings. What a novel concept!

What Joshua failed to understand was that Lockheed, as an emergent property of the nature of its prime contract on Orion, was not interested in solving problems quickly. This is now an undeniable historical fact, since it has taken 20 years and is still nowhere near being a serviceable capsule. In fact, as described there and I’ve personally witnessed in completely unrelated programs, it was normal to “play the game” and claim, incorrectly, that NASA attempting to coordinate a minor change to requirements would invalidate years of work and require everyone to start over again. 

“There was a thing that was done on Orion very often that I called playing the game. And what this was is that when someone from NASA would come to you and say, ‘Okay, you know, this part that you attached to has changed. It now weighs this much. You have to carry that much weight.’ But what the people on the Orion project would do would throw their hands up and say, ‘Well, if this is changing, then the entirety of my project has to start over.’ and they would act as if they’ve done, you know, years of work and now it’s all meaningless.”

The implication here is that Lockheed technical managers intentionally deceived their evidently-eager-to-be-deceived NASA counterparts by claiming that large amounts of work had been done (it hadn’t) to a level of rigor (it wasn’t) that was invalidated by requirements changes (that can be easily addressed through parametric design) requiring years of additional effort. 

Docking system missing, please pay $2.5b

Another key capability that was deferred c. 2010 (after Constellation cancellation) and then not officially reinstated until late 2023 (!) was the ability for Orion to dock. Yes, the “Multi Purpose Crew Vehicle” had a forward hatch, a docking tunnel, and was designed to transport humans from Earth to a variety of space destinations, including the ISS, various lunar landers, the Gateway, and perhaps even an asteroid capture system. But in 2023, Lockheed’s champion contract negotiation lawyers managed to put the screws on NASA’s hapless program management and extract a transfer of an additional $2.5b for “scope creep” primarily related to docking capability.

I’m a technical manager. I’ve had bad days. Who hasn’t? But I’ve never had a “we forgot to ask about docking for 13 years and now it’s going to cost us $2.5b to correct” day. Has this ever happened to you? 

Remember, the space community is currently melting down about Acting Administrator Duffy’s move to re-open the HLS contract, which has currently spent only $2.7b for an entire lunar lander! I’m willing to bet that SpaceX is going to throw in the docking hardware for free. 

It was already built and qualified in early 2024!

In fact, in Christian Davenport’s latest book “Rocket Dreams”, he relates how back in 2013, newly-hired SpaceX engineer Jim Matthews and his intern Craig Western re-engineered NASA’s ISS docking adapter using bicycle parts in a few weeks for a total parts cost of under $25k.

Apropos of nothing, on page 2 of NASA OIG’s report IG-20-018, it says:

Just a few pages later, we can read:

NASA and Lockheed negotiated this contract. Lockheed then recursively sifts through the text for errors and pushes for expensive changes. For example, they were able to successfully make the argument that the ABC contract didn’t contain docking capability for the spacecraft they’d been collaborating on for, at that time, 18 years. Expensive mistake! Compare this to the endless hoops Uncle Sam makes small businesses jump through for a measly $200k SBIR.

It gets better. 

In Appendix E on page 47, the OIG states that NASA has budgeted $0.5m for the “Addition of Docking Requirement to System Requirement Documents”. 

I think I have to go and lie down. 

NASA constantly generates reports from the OIG, GAO, and about five other layers of oversight. Why? What’s the point? What changes as a result? Name a single engineering line manager who ever had anything written in one of these reports come up in a performance review! Specify a single time that any one of these reports resulted in the Orion project becoming faster, better, or cheaper. Why do we do this to ourselves?

Abort system and other crew safety systems

As reported by Eric Berger back in 2016, the launch abort system was also caught up in a spate of deferments intended to accelerate the launch of the uncrewed test vehicle. The GAO expressed deep concern about schedule and budget performance, and estimated that another seven years of development would be required before crew would fly on Orion. As of today, that number is closer to ten, assuming that Artemis II launches next year. 

What was the point of flying Artemis I if huge swaths of its flight critical human safety systems were not even present? How can we infer anything about the safety of the crew for Artemis II without any real world flight data? Why do we make commercial crew providers go through endless safety meetings and requirements stakeholders engagement processes and licensing test flights, only to strap astronauts into a government rocket that’s effectively flying a unique configuration on a far more challenging mission? Why are we still planning to use this incandescently expensive death trap for some participation trophy Apollo 8 repeat mission before finally giving it the cancellation it has so richly deserved for so long?

Parachute test failures

This happened back in 2008. Most of the primary sources are link rotted. Lots of capsules had parachute problems. It appears to have been corrected by 2013.

This usually never happens, I swear!

Power distribution system

Back in 2020, during testing it was discovered that a redundant power/data unit (PDU) had failed, and what’s more, it’s an essentially permanent part of the spacecraft structure so replacing it will take the better part of a year.

Is this a joke? Does it actually need a year to replace it? Is Lockheed “playing the game”? Or have they actually designed a capsule which is so unmanufacturable it takes a year to replace a part? Has the NASA program manager actually sat on the Lockheed shop floor with a stopwatch and a clipboard and checked that the thousands of hours being charged to make this change are actually resulting in an actual technician actually working on the capsule? If not, what else are they doing with their copious free time? Charitably Orion might contain 10,000 functional parts. What are their shelf lives? How well designed were they to begin with? How often are we going to have to go through this charade?

The electrical system has, at this point, suffered numerous weird failures and glitches in tests of every single subsystem. Who designed it? Where do they work now? Why did NASA pay Lockheed billions of dollars for program management and oversight and still manage to buy this garbage?

It’s not just this particular PDU. As reported by the OIG in 2024 (page 11), Artemis I experienced 24 separate power interruptions, or more than one per day in space. Essentially the system is tripping circuit breakers, but why? This is not an expected failure mode. The investigation team has pointed the finger at space radiation and implemented a software workaround. 

First, I hope they’re correct. 

Second, it’s not like the PCDU was just some Chinesium battery management system (BMS) ordered overnight off Temu and slapped into the capsule (I hope). NASA spends millions of dollars just writing down requirements. OIG doesn’t go into detail but I would be shocked if the power system requirements did not include radiation tolerance for a capsule that’s intended to fly to deep space with people on board and which has a $31b price tag. So what went wrong? Do we need more requirements? Or fewer?

Battery design won’t stop changing for no apparent reason

As reported on NASA Space Flight (and OIG-24-011), a 2024 qualification test found that a launch abort shock load could disconnect the Orion flight battery. Amit Kshatriya, who is now Associate Administrator, revealed in an interview that the Artemis II battery is a significantly different design to Artemis I, which does not have this particular problem, in part to increase the safety of the cells. 

“The Artemis I design was a large cell battery, high capacitance,” Kshatriya said in the NSF interview. “[It uses the] same material but did not have all of the mitigations that we’d like to have on a human-rated vehicle.”

“We accepted that for [Artemis I] because we didn’t have to deal with the loss of crew risk, so we let that battery design fly. [The] Artemis II batteries have all the safety [features], like small cell, isolated cells, all of those protections built in to prevent a thermal runaway.”

“That’s not the only thing you do to prevent that kind of thing, but bottom line is that we like the Artemis II design because it’s way safer for the crew,” he added. NASA and Lockheed Martin are looking at different options to resolve the battery issue.

“In terms of the options that are still remaining, I think they have a good understanding of the environment and what in the design is causing the off-nominal vibration response and so there’s a couple of things that they’re working through in terms of either a repair, in-situ, of the existing batteries, or an acceleration of the Artemis III shipset,” Kshatriya said.”

Bizarrely, we see here that NASA and Lockheed have designed not one, not two, but at least three completely different battery systems. Why do the job properly once when you can take three times longer and earn three times more to do it three times, badly? Why build up flight heritage when you can recursively send a tiny pressurized capsule containing living breathing humans into deep space with an untested, newly designed battery system and just hope that the magical battery smoke stays in the box?

It may shock you to learn that designing connectors that can survive significant shock and vibe is not, in fact, rocket science. Kynix, Waytek, and about two dozen other highly mature manufacturers produce millions of connectors for the automotive industry in every configuration imaginable, each for a couple of bucks at most, many of them IP67 rated for water and dust ingress, and nearly all of them positively retained by extremely exotic “clip” technology that allows assembly line workers and repair mechanics to quickly and safety connect and disconnect wires when they want to, and to ensure the wiring harness remains intact despite the unthinkable levels of abuse the driving public constantly subject their too-easily-insured cars to. NASA might want to look into it.

Flight software

Flight software is highly non-trivial. That’s why Boeing outsourced their Starliner software to a sub-sub-sub-contractor in India and then acted surprised when their capsule failed in flight three times in a row. 

Not to be outdone, Lockheed pressed pause on flight software and avionics development for a few years to “save” time and money, and then later found a series of issues. 

In a reversal of the perversion which is seeing Orion get three entirely differently designed batteries, GAO revealed (page 14) in 2016 that NASA intends to reuse not just the software but actual avionics hardware between Artemis I and Artemis II – the same parts which were found to be defective in 2022 and which, in some cases, take multiple months to even access within the spacecraft structure. 

I’ve heard of Russia going to some pretty extreme lengths to get their hands on sanctioned computer chips to continue to build cruise missiles with which to bomb Kyiv, but I would have thought for $31b NASA could afford to buy a spare? 

Surprising no-one, OIG revealed (page 17) in 2020 that Lockheed’s technical challenges with, inter alia, display units and flight software resulted in overruns between 2015 and 2019 of $900m. 

I’ve worked on a lot of software in my time. I know some very highly compensated software engineers. Even then, $10m seems like a lot of money to build a sufficiently reliable software and hardware stack for a space capsule, especially if you’re using primarily COTS computer hardware from Taiwan (like anyone else) and leveraging decades of experience as an expert contractor and government space agency. $100m seems crazy. $900m is insane. What’s that? $900m is only the cost overrun? How? That’s literally 10,000 person years of labor. You could retype the entirety of Wikipedia with 10,000 person years of labor!

How many black projects are hiding inside the Orion trenchcoat? 

These problems also resulted in a five month delay, which at a rate of $3.2b/year is another $1.3b. Just throw it on the pile. 

If the US is going to spend $100b on this project, I’m sorry, but second back to the Moon does not cut it. Second fastest is first loser. 

Systems that have not yet caused problems

For the sake of completeness, the following systems do not yet appear to have generated problems. There is a chance that they were done correctly the first time, but given the track record of this project, I would keep a very close eye on them.

Crew module structure. Aluminum-lithium pressure vessel. No cracks or leaks, that we know of. This is in contrast to the primary structure of the Russian part of the space station, which has cracks so extensive that multiple kilograms of air are being lost every day, and which could fail catastrophically at any time.

Launch abort system attitude control thrusters. Successfully tested, hopefully will never be needed.

Solar arrays. Four 7 kW ESA-provided solar array wings. Hilariously obsolete in a post-Starlink world but if they work, they work. Soyuz semi-frequently has solar array deployment failures.

Radiators. No leaks (unlike Soyuz…) sufficient heat rejection. No drama so far. Good.

Contractor underperformance is overdetermined

At this point you might fairly wonder perhaps it would be easier if we instead listed subsystems that didn’t have problems. Look, I’m a technical pragmatist. All spacecraft have design problems and tough tradeoffs. I get it. But 20 years? $30b? How did Congress, NASA, Lockheed, and its subcontractors manage to screw this up this badly? It turns out that there are, in accordance with Conway’s Law, a set of organizational and process problems that are the genesis of literally every single Orion system currently existing in a state of catastrophic hazardous life-threatening liability. 

They want it this way. 

I could crib more notes from dozens of more or less pointless OIG/GAO reports, but what’s the point? Here’s the gist. The contractor was slow and expensive. They struggle to disguise their contempt for the US taxpayer, the customer (NASA), their sub contractors, and even their own employees. They find ways to profit from their deliberate sabotage of programs vital to the interests of the United States. NASA seems to be unable to stop themselves handing the contractor performance bonuses worth hundreds of millions of dollars per year, despite no delivery. Numerous former NASA officials have do-nothing no-show jobs with these contractors. Could it be related?

They want it this way. 

Show me the outcome and I’ll show you the incentives. NASA’s internal development capabilities are so atrophied that when they tell their contractor community that they’re only doing firm fixed price contracts henceforth, Boeing will publicly announce that they will only be doing cost plus, and NASA has no choice. 

I am obsessed with space. I want a radically better future for humanity. I want astronauts to fly shining spacecraft that display the Stars and Stripes and embody a deep respect for technical excellence. I want a large research station on the Moon and a growing city on Mars. 

Lockheed won’t do fixed price because they don’t know how to make money by delivering value. 

In my opinion, NASA and Lockheed’s track record on Orion speaks for itself and calls for eternal damnation and a permanent revocation of their ability to do work for the government. If our government will take a 10% stake in Intel as a “reward” for their decades of mismanagement and reckless endangerment of US strategic security interests, on what grounds should Lockheed not be broken up and/or nationalized?

Lying to you with your own tax dollars

Boeing (the prime contractor on SLS), Lockheed, and NASA routinely produce and disseminate propaganda to promote their systems and obscure their continuing failures. Because NASA and these programs are publicly funded, your tax dollars are paying rooms full of people to sit behind laptops and invent lies and then attempt to disinform you and to deceive the public. 

In November 2024 I reviewed NASA’s (so-called) Moon to Mars Architecture Definition Document. It evidently still lives rent-free in my head. It is 434 pages long. It probably cost $5m just to produce. As far as I know, I’m the only person on Earth who read it all the way through. If you have also read this entire document, let’s form a club of conditionally sane people. If you worked on the report, give me a call. I would like to gain insight into the creative process.

On page 85, NASA shamelessly perjures themselves with this absolute screamer:

The desperation is tangible. Somehow, even though this was written two years ago, the SLS still staggers on, defiantly accumulating Ls. 

“With its unprecedented power and capabilities, SLS is the only launch vehicle that can send Orion, astronauts, and payloads directly to the Moon on a single launch.”

This is an obvious lie, published in March 2024, funded by your tax dollars. 

The SLS does not have unprecedented power and capabilities, there are several other rockets flying today with better performance, which is why NASA launched Europa Clipper on Falcon Heavy. Starship is far more powerful. The SLS cannot launch any astronauts or payload directly to the Moon. Artemis cannot launch humans to the Moon on a single launch, SLS or no. Orion cannot transport astronauts until its heat shield, which may be unfixable, is fixed. A lie!

“Humans will be transported safely, and different payloads will be delivered efficiently and effectively, to enable a variety of complex missions in cislunar and deep space.”

The SLS costs over $4b per launch. Even if it was safe and effective (it is not) it cannot be efficient. This is another publicly funded and obvious (and therefore stupid) lie. 

NASA’s mission to explore the universe and perform valuable science is grievously undermined by its continued transparent falsehoods about the (in)capacity of its horrendously mismanaged flagship launch system.

Shame!

Imagine the individual and institutional levels of contempt necessary to even attempt to sell this utter BS to the US taxpayer. They think you are so stupid it’s not even necessary to cloak their fantasy and grift in verifiable facts. 

On Orion, one pager later, NASA writes:

While this passage contains fewer blatant lies, it does rather hopefully label Orion as a next-generation spacecraft. This is despite the fact that it’s three times heavier than Dragon, uses a rocket engine designed so long ago that even the children of the designers are now retired, and has progressed so slowly and expensively that China has built, flown, and retired entire space stations in the same time. The one sense in which Orion actually is “next generation” is that my generation will not live long enough to see it actually work. 

Not to be outdone, Lockheed’s X account posted in July 2020 the following, which as of today remains up more than five years later. 

Artemis I had unexpected radiation problems that affected the power system.

Every space capsule, not to mention commercially certified airplane, has multi-string redundant computers. Also, the only time these systems were actually tested in flight, they failed.

This will come as a surprise to the Mars Perseverance EDL crew, who managed to land a one tonne rover within a mile of its target, on Mars. Or the OSIRIS-REx team, who managed to boop an asteroid. 

This is pretty rich given that even in 2020, Orion’s heat shield had already failed once and that SpaceX’s Dragon capsule used the PICA-X heat shield material explicitly and publicly designed to withstand the heat of entry from the Moon and Mars. 

So what now?

Let us summarize. Orion is:

• Superfluous. Not only does it not have a reference mission, we don’t need it to go to the Moon, and never have. Its presence in the program only adds a bewildering array of additional marginal requirements that drive the program further from any chance of success.
• Insanely expensive. An incredible boondoggle. It spends more in a year than SpaceX spent in total on its first space capsule. Twice as much!
• Delayed well beyond the point of sanity. Back in 2013 it was already running so far behind schedule that no serious space exploration architectures could put it on the critical path. To have imagined then that twelve years later it would still not have flown humans…
• Irredeemably unsafe. The systems engineering was compromised from the beginning. The most obvious symptom of this rot is the unfixable, fundamentally flawed heat shield, but nearly every other subsystem is unstable, untested, and unfit. 

“The biggest mistake that smart engineers will make is to optimize something, a part or process, that should not exist.” Elon Musk, literally every day of his life. 

How does SpaceX do it? They employ The Algorithm. 

1. Question all requirements, tie them back to a responsible individual by name.
2. Delete unnecessary parts and processes. Delete until the rate of adding back equals the rate of deletion.
3. Simplify, optimize.
4. Accelerate cycle time.
5. Automate.

This post forms a good roadmap for Step One and makes it extremely clear which parts of the Artemis program are dead weight. Delete without mercy. Prioritization doesn’t count until it hurts. Something must be given up for success to occur. 

Finally, in the words of a wise man, Slow is Fake. It is not a coincidence that the most expensive capsule development programs are also slow, error-ridden, and diverging from success. We have now run the experiment. Urgency and accountability drives success. Endless process and layers of bureaucracy guarantee failure. 

SLS and Orion do not meet NASA’s internal safety standards, and it’s not even close. Even with ten successful uncrewed test flights, fundamentally flawed designs would not create great enough statistical certainty on safety, and instead NASA proposes to fly Artemis II with people around the Moon, a uniquely demanding mission, in a unique configuration with a heat shield design and life support system that has never been tested before. It is quite something to have managed to engineer a spacecraft even more dangerous than Shuttle, but NASA, Boeing, and Lockheed have done it. Once again, NASA is rolling the dice on tragedy and national humiliation. 

Even if SLS and Orion met NASA’s safety standards, their extreme expense, schedule delays, and unprofessional program management exclude them from serious consideration as a system which poses a meaningful threat to Chinese domination of the Moon. In no universe could any program executed in the contemptuously slipshod manner of Orion even approach convergence to success. 

We don’t need to theorize about this. We have 20 years of evidence before our eyes. 

Orion has failed. Now let it die before it kills us.