NASA just made this Big announcement after Orion unexpectedly Leaked during…

Good afternoon and welcome to NASA's Johnson Space Center for our final mission status briefing ahead of Artemis 2 splashdown tomorrow evening. We are joined by a panel of specialists today. Joining us is NASA Associate Administrator Amit Shatria, Artemis 2 Flight Director Jeff Radigan, and Artemis 2 Orion Vehicle Manager Breniel Rodriguez. We are going to be taking questions from media here in the room and through our phone bridge today. But before we get started, we will kick it off with some opening remarks. Amit, go ahead. Good afternoon. Tomorrow evening, Reid, Victor, Christina, and Jeremy, the crew of Artemis 2, will come home. They will have traveled 400,000 miles. They will have seen what no living person has seen. They will have tested every system on the spacecraft and the environment it was built for. And they will have given us 10 days of data that will shape every mission that comes after. The test is not complete. Tomorrow, the Orion spacecraft will enter the Earth's atmosphere at approximately 25,000 miles per hour. That heat shield, the thermal protection system, which is built by American hands and American factories, or materials designed to withstand temperatures that approach the surface of the sun, will bear the full force of that reentry. Every system we've demonstrated over the past nine days, life support, navigation, propulsion, communications, all of it depends on the final minutes of flight. We have high confidence in the system and the heat shield and the parachutes and the recovery systems we put together. The engineering supports it. The Artemis 1 flight data supports it. All of our ground tests supports it. Our analysis supports it. And tomorrow, the crew is going to put their lives behind that confidence. Until then, the flight control team, the engineering team, the recovery forces in the Pacific, to every engineer, every technician that's touched this machine, tomorrow belongs to you. The crew has done their part. Now we have to do ours. With that, I'll turn it over to Jeff. Thanks, Amit. I will mention that the crew's had a great time in space and they've really enjoyed doing all of the checkouts that they've done. Of course, the lunar flyby was quite a day. But now we absolutely turn towards entry. And so Rick Henfling and the entry team are on console today getting ready, doing all of the pre-entry checks and ensuring that the cockpit is configured for entry, which will, of course, occur tomorrow. I do have a few times for you as the capsule comes in. Of course, we'll hand back from the DSN network to the TDRS network at 6.15 local central time. And then the crew module and the service module is going to separate around 6.33. We will do a crew module raise burn to take the crew module slightly away from the service module as it comes down. And then we'll enter blackout at 6.53 local central time. About 10 minutes later, the drogue chutes will deploy. That's 7.03. And then the main chutes will be right behind them a minute later, 7.04. And we'll see those three main parachutes come out leading down to splashdown at 7.07. And looking forward to a great day tomorrow. With that, I'll hand it over to Branyel. Thank you, Jeff. So the spacecraft team and the Orion team, we've been doing assessments over the last few days with an integrated team from flight operations and all of our subject matter experts here within Orion. And we've reviewed all the systems. We've reviewed all the reentry procedures and activities. And we are good to go. And so the team's done an excellent job walking through those, ensuring that those systems on board Orion and on the ground are ready to support. Orion remains healthy. It's been working fantastic. And Debbie showed you some images yesterday of our TPS system, our thermal protection system. And we completed those assessments and everything looks really, really well to continue on. So we're ready to go in inside the vehicle, the spacecraft systems. It's a nice 75 degrees. So kind of like a winter day in Houston. And the crew's loving it. So everything is looking really well from the vehicle standpoint. Thank you. I'm going to tell you, it's 13 minutes of things that have to go right, is the way I think about it. You know, I have a whole checklist in my head that we, you know, we're going through of all the things that have to happen. You know, the forward bay cover has to come off. The drogues have to come out. The main chutes have to deploy. The reefing systems have to cut. And we have to get the touchdown angle alignment correct. And then hit the water correctly. And even prior to that, right, we've got the CMSMSEP separation between the service module and the crew module. That has to go right. And then you have the heat shield that has to work. So it's not so much 13 minutes. It's more in my head about an hour and a half of things that have to go right. And that's the way I think of them. Sure. So it's actually not an oxygen tank issue. It's oxidizer. It's in the propulsion system, not in the breathable atmosphere system. And so it's, you know, one of our two-part propulsion system, which, you know, allows us to burn in space. You know, we are seeing what is a small leak in our pressure and system. The leak is not to space. It's internal to the system, you know, across some of our valves. And we really need to characterize that to see what, if any, you know, modifications we might need to make in the future. And so we had some time in the timeline dedicated to some other activities, right, having the crew pilot the vehicle again. And it made more sense for us to go ensure that we fully understood the characterization of the service module and the pressurization system, because we don't get the service module back. There's no question that I'll be anxious. And, you know, I'll be with the families. We'll be with them. We'll all be together. You know, I have full confidence in the team. They do too. You know, we've been with them the whole time. And so, you know, we've done the work. It's impossible to say you don't have irrational fears left, right? But I would tell you I don't have any rational fears about what's going to happen. We've done the work we need to. And we, you know, have full confidence in the team, the recovery team, the flight control team, the analysis and the work we did. Well, Renny, I'll talk about the details, but I'll tell you the team has extracted every ounce of test data we can out of it. I'm very pleased with the coordination and the way that we've added objectives in flight and the way we prioritize, like Jeff said, on cases where we need actual forensic data on the hardware we're getting back versus not. So we've prioritized that the right way. But Renny, you want to talk through that a little bit? Yeah, absolutely. As far as the things that we've learned, right, it is a test flight. And so we are learning things on the spacecraft. And I think we've talked several of them in these press conferences as we have. But we gather those data, as Jeff noted. We take characterization tests of systems that we won't get back home. And when we get back home and the vehicle comes back, we'll do a lot of post processing of all that data. I think that they said it best. This isn't the trip. It's the first of many trips. And we just need to continue on because there's so much there. Think about how much we thought we knew what was going on. And we thought we knew what the moon looked like. And now we see it a totally different way. I think we're going to see that on the next mission to the moon as well. And we need to keep going. We need to have the crew home before we do that. Rick Henfling will be the flight director on console. I imagine he'll have some words for all of us. But really, we're just focused on getting the crew home. And then we can we can start thinking about celebrating. All right, that's all the time we have for today. Our special coverage of Artemis 2 splashdown begins tomorrow at 5.30 p.m. Central Time ahead of splashdown at 7.07 p.m. Central Time. We look forward to seeing you back here tomorrow. Thanks for joining.