Ok after looking into this in more detail, I am concerned with this mission, and the recommendation should be NOT to fly with Astronauts.

Looking at the people on the program, and specialty from the ones on this press conference [1] I see only, a bunch of check list fillers and government employees, that will cover their back with reports and third party recommendations, of the style, “I was told” or the “the technical reports said”. Its also commiserating the idiotic and irrelevant questions from most of the press present. How do these people get accredited there?

Here are some facts. When NASA flew Orion uncrewed around the Moon in 2022, the heat shield came back with deep gouges. Large chunks of Avcoat material had blown out, and three of four structural bolts had melted through. NASA own Inspector General identified three independently lethal failure modes:

- Heat shield spalling exposing the capsule to burn through

- Debris striking the parachute compartment

- Hot gas ingestion through the melted bolts

Noting the latter could cause the "breakup of the vehicle and loss of crew." Then...NASA found a credible root cause. The Avcoat was not porous enough, so pyrolysis gas built up underneath and blew pieces out, like steam cracking a lid.

Critically, areas of the Artemis I shield that were porous did not spall. But where it gets alarming is that the Artemis II heat shield was manufactured to be even less porous, a choice made before anyone knew porosity mattered.

Rather than replace it, NASA changed the reentry trajectory, instead of a skip reentry meaning dipping in, bouncing out, then re-entering, Orion will dive in steeper. The counterintuitive logic here is more intense, sustained heating actually allows the char layer to form properly and become porous enough for gas to escape, whereas the gentler intermittent heating of the skip paradoxically trapped gas. The physics reasoning is sound, but it has never been validated at full scale. As incredible as it may sound no one has flown this shield design, at this porosity, on this trajectory, at 25,000 mph lunar return speed, on a spacecraft twice the weight of Apollo.

The computer model certifying it as safe can predict crack initiation but cannot model crack propagation or the coupled multi physics material response, which is precisely what you need when your failure mode is cascading spalling that creates unpredictable hot spots and alters hypersonic airflow in ways that compound.

NASA also failed to recover the Artemis I parachutes, so there is literally zero data on whether debris impacted the system that slows the capsule from 300 mph to 15 mph for splashdown...

Perhaps most tellingly, NASA has announced its switching to an entirely new heat shield design! starting with Artemis III, simultaneously certifying this shield as safe to fly while deciding never to fly it again!

The strongest argument against crewing this flight is the simplest. NASA recently added an extra Artemis mission to its manifest, removing any programmatic need for astronauts on Artemis II.

Flying it uncrewed on the new trajectory would validate or invalidate the models at zero risk to human life, produce full-scale flight data on the actual shield at the actual porosity on the actual trajectory, and let NASA recover the parachutes to close the debris impact gap.

Then crew the next mission with data instead of models. As Camarda, a former NASA astronaut and heat shield expert has warned, this is the same organizational pattern, meaning schedule pressure, simplified models substituted for physical understanding of the system, motivated reasoning to reach a predetermined conclusion that preceded both Challenger and Columbia.

Lets say a SpaceX Dragon or Boeing Starliner came back with this level of damage, would NASA certify it for crew without an uncrewed validation flight?

NASA is risking four lives, when a straightforward, safe alternative, exists.

[1] - https://youtu.be/TQH21XCsp5U

Didn't they have a crash dummy in it the last time? The data from buster should be able to tell us if the parachute worked or not.

Those astronauts don’t have anyone that loves them at home because no way in hell would any of my loved ones let me be a sacrificial turkey in a fully automated oven.