NASA’s schedule currently places Artemis III launching in 2027 and Artemis IV in 2028. Kshatriya said he is confident that NASA, the European Space Agency and Airbus, which builds the service module, will be able to fix the valve problem in time for Artemis IV. Manufacturing of the Artemis IV service module is largely complete.
“I’m pretty sure we’ll need to make design changes to at least reduce the leak rate, if not fundamentally change the way the valve works,” he said.
Valves are a common problem on rockets and spacecraft. Nearly every American human spaceflight program has suffered from malfunctioning or leaking valves. Boeing’s Starliner crew capsule suffered a helium leak in its propulsion system, as well as other problems, during a test flight to the International Space Station in 2024. The helium valve on the Space Launch System rocket had to be replaced for the Artemis I and Artemis II launches. SpaceX has also canceled launches due to valve problems. The list goes on.
“There are a lot of options to deal with this problem,” Kshatriya said of the Orion spacecraft issue. “If anything, I would characterize this as a production redesign risk for the Artemis IV mission that I think we may have come across, and that’s why we’ve paid so much attention to it during this mission to make sure [we understand] “What are we looking at?”
One of the big lessons NASA learned on Artemis I involved the capsule’s heat shield. As the vehicle re-entered the atmosphere, the ablative thermal barrier burned unevenly, but Orion still made it to a safe, on-target splashdown. NASA officials said they are confident the heat shield will remain on Artemis II after adjusting for Orion’s passage through the upper atmosphere. A new heat shield design will be launched on Artemis III.
NASA engineers spent two years investigating the heat shield issue after Artemis I. Kshatriya doesn’t expect Valve’s redesign to take that long.
“It’s not the safety of the flight, it’s the safety of the crew, essential work like heat shield checks that has sent us down,” he said. “It’s going to take work to fix it, but it’s not that big.”
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