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NASA’s first Artemis Moon mission a flawless success after Orion splashdown

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3 years ago

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NASA has successfully recovered an uncrewed version of its Orion crew capsule, marking the flawless completion of the spacecraft’s first Moon mission and the Space Launch System (SLS) rocket’s first launch.

Six years behind schedule, roughly $20 billion over budget, and costing taxpayers almost $50 billion through its first full flight test, anything less than near-perfection would have been a moderate scandal. But to the credit of NASA and its contractors, who have all worn excuses in the spirit of ‘perfection takes time’ threadbare, the international team behind Artemis I appears to have actually delivered on those implied promises. While some small bugs were unsurprisingly discovered over the 25-day mission, a collection of excellent post-launch NASASpaceflight.com interviews confirm that each major part of the SLS rocket performed about as flawlessly as their respective teams could have hoped for.

Originally intended to launch in late 2016, the first SLS rocket lifted off with the second space-bound Orion spacecraft on November 16th, 2022. Propelled by its European Service Module (ESM), Orion passed the Moon around November 21st. It then entered an unusual distant retrograde orbit (DRO) around the Moon on November 26th, reaching a record distance of 432,200 kilometers (268,563 mi) from Earth in the process. After less than a week in lunar orbit, Orion departed DRO on December 1st and began a long journey back to Earth.

On December 11th, about four weeks after liftoff, Orion separated from its disposable service module (~$400 million) and slammed into Earth’s atmosphere traveling around 11 kilometers per second (~25,000 mph). In another credit to NASA and capsule contractor Lockheed Martin, Orion’s reentry, descent, and splashdown all went perfectly. After its ablative heat shield did most of the work slowing it down, the spacecraft deployed parachutes and splashed down in the Pacific Ocean some 240 kilometers (~150 mi) off the coast of Mexico’s Baja Peninsula, southwest of California.

Taking full advantage of the fact that Orion and SLS are a government program and continuing in the footsteps of the Apollo Program, the US Navy was tasked with Orion spacecraft recovery. To that end, it deployed USS Portland – a 208-meter-long amphibious transport ship crewed by hundreds of sailors – to recover Artemis I’s Orion, which was completed without issue using the ship’s Navy helicopters, fast boats, and floodable well-deck.

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(NASA)
The USS Portland hovers in the distance as a Navy team prepares to recover Orion. (NASA)
Only a tiny portion of the first deep space Orion capsule will be reused. (NASA)

Following capsule recovery, which wrapped up almost seven hours after splashdown, it’s safe to say that NASA’s Artemis I mission was a spectacular, near-perfect success. Only a few aspects detract from the extraordinary performance of the spacecraft. Most significantly, despite being half a decade behind schedule and billions of dollars over budget, Artemis I’s Orion capsule and service module did not fly with or test a functioning docking port or Environmental Control and Life Support System (ECLSS). Those systems will not be tested in space until Artemis II, Orion’s first astronaut launch, inherently reducing the risk-reduction and predictive value of the flight test.

Additionally, Artemis I launched Orion to a distant retrograde lunar orbit. No future NASA missions are scheduled to use DRO. For the time being, Artemis II will be a free-return lunar flyby mission, meaning that Orion will never enter orbit around the Moon – the safest possible lunar trajectory for its crewed debut. For Artemis III and all future Orion missions, the spacecraft will enter a different near-rectilinear halo orbit (NRHO) around the Moon – similar to DRO in spirit but entirely different in practice. That again slightly reduces the value of Orion’s spectacular performance during Artemis I.

Waiting for Artemis II

Finally, due to a series of decisions and the shockingly slow expected performance NASA and its contractors, the next Orion and SLS launch is unlikely to occur before 2025. Recently discussed by the US Government Accountability Office (GAO) in a September 2022 report [PDF], the cause is strange. GAO says that “NASA estimates it will require ~27 months between Artemis I and Artemis II due to Orion integration activities and reuse of avionics from the Artemis I crew capsule on…Artemis II.” In other words, even though Artemis I was near-flawless, Artemis II will be delayed partly because of an attempt to reuse a tiny portion of its successfully recovered capsule.

All four proposed SLS variants.

Ars Technica’s Eric Berger recently provided another tidbit of painful context with the discovery that the decision to reuse the first deep space Orion’s avionics boxes was made eight years ago to close a “$100 million budget hole.” Inexplicably, NASA and Lockheed Martin believe it will take more than “two years to re-certify the flight hardware.” Berger explains that years ago, NASA only intended to launch SLS’s first Block 1 variant once, and expected that it would take at least three years to retrofit the rocket’s sole launch tower for the rocket’s Block 1B upgrade and second launch overall.

Years later, parochial pork-hungry members of Congress leaped on an opportunity to force NASA to build a second launch tower to help avoid that three-year gap between launches. Ironically, that second tower, ML-2, is now expected to cost anywhere from 2.5 to 4 times more than its original $383 million price tag and is years behind schedule. Meanwhile, SLS Block 1B is also years behind schedule, which led NASA to decide to launch SLS Block 1 three times instead of just once.

(NASA)
The Artemis II SLS rocket and Orion spacecraft are already well under construction. (NASA)

Ultimately, that means that the bizarrely slow recertification of eight Artemis I Orion avionics boxes – not the SLS rocket, ground systems, or any rework required after their launch debut – is now “the primary critical path for…Artemis II.” As a result, Berger estimates that delays caused by the decisions NASA made to save $100 million almost a decade ago will likely end up costing taxpayers $1 billion.

Artemis II is unlikely to launch less than 27 months after Artemis I, pegging the launch no earlier than February 2025. That gap of more than two years is just 20% shorter than the 33-month gap a NASA advisor once said could raise safety concerns because of the loss of experience that would result, which factored into the decision to build a second launch tower. Ultimately, NASA appears to have secured another very large chunk of time to ensure that Artemis II – like Artemis I – goes as perfectly as possible when the time finally comes.

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Eric Ralph is Teslarati's senior spaceflight reporter and has been covering the industry in some capacity for almost half a decade, largely spurred in 2016 by a trip to Mexico to watch Elon Musk reveal SpaceX's plans for Mars in person. Aside from spreading interest and excitement about spaceflight far and wide, his primary goal is to cover humanity's ongoing efforts to expand beyond Earth to the Moon, Mars, and elsewhere.

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Jim Cramer chimes in on Tesla CEO Elon Musk’s pay package

“Don’t be small-minded: Tesla is about robots, Full Self-Driving, the future. Give him his package.”

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10 hours ago

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October 23, 2025

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Credit: The Street

Investor and host of Mad Money on MSNBC , Jim Cramer, has chimed in on Tesla CEO Elon Musk’s pay package and whether it should be rewarded to the frontman or not.

Cramer has drawn a lot of attention regarding his sentiments on Tesla, as investors have routinely given him a pretty hard time over what he’s said about the company.

For the past few years, we have covered his comments on Tesla when he has something to say, mostly because his opinion on the stock seems to change pretty frequently; at a minimum, he has something different to say about it every few months.

However, Cramer knows Musk’s value to Tesla, and said on Thursday that he believes the CEO deserves his pay package:

“Don’t be small-minded: Tesla is about robots, Full Self-Driving, the future. Give him his package.”

Cramer’s comments come just one day after Tesla’s Q3 2025 Earnings Call, where Musk took several opportunities to call out the importance of the pay package and how it could impact the company’s future — with or without him.

Musk said at one point that he would not feel comfortable continuing to develop the company’s massive fleet of Optimus bots without having appropriate control of the company from a voting perspective.

He said he does not want so much power that if he “were to lose his mind,” he could not be removed. However, he does feel he needs to be protected from “activist shareholders,” or “corporate terrorists” like proxy groups Institutional Shareholder Services (ISS) and Glass Lewis:

“My fundamental concern with regard to how much voting control I have at Tesla is if I go ahead and build this enormous robot army, can I just be ousted at some point in the future? …It’s just, if we build this robot army, do I have at least a strong influence over that robot army, not current control, but a strong influence? That’s what it comes down to in a nutshell. I don’t feel comfortable wielding that robot army if I don’t have at least a strong influence.”

At the end of the call, Musk said:

“Like I said, I just don’t feel comfortable building a robot army here and then being ousted because of some asinine recommendations from ISS and Glass Lewis, who have no freaking clue. I mean, those guys are corporate terrorists.”

Cramer is one of many who realize Musk’s importance to Tesla, and how the company would likely lack the guidance and prowess it does without his planning and drive. However, Tesla shareholders will have the ultimate say on November 6 when they vote on Musk’s compensation plan.

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Tesla is stumped on how to engineer this Optimus part, but they’re close

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11 hours ago

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October 23, 2025

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Credit: Tesla

Tesla has been stumped on how to engineer one crucial part of the Optimus bot, but CEO Elon Musk says the company is “on the cusp” of achieving something great with the project.

During the Q3 2025 Earnings Call, Tesla CEO Elon Musk revealed the company is moving closer to a major breakthrough with the Optimus project, and said they are “on the cusp of something really tremendous.”

However, it seems there is one specific portion of the robot that has truly stumped engineers at the company: the hand, fingers, and forearm.

Musk went into great detail about how incredibly complex and amazing the human hand is, highlighting its dexterity and capability, as its ability to perform a wide variety of tasks is especially impressive:

“I don’t want to downplay the difficulty, but it’s an incredibly difficult thing, especially to create a hand that is as dexterous and capable as the human hand, which is incredible. The human hand is an incredible thing. The more you study the human hand, the more incredible you realize it is, and why you need four fingers and a thumb, why the fingers have certain degrees of freedom, why the various muscles are of different strengths, and fingers are of different lengths. It turns out that those are all there for a reason.”

It’s been pretty apparent that Tesla has made massive strides in the Optimus project, especially considering it has been able to walk down hills, learn things like Kung Fu, and even perform service tasks like serving food and drinks.

However, a recent look at a Gen 2.5 version of Optimus posted by Marc Benioff, the CEO of Salesforce, showed that Tesla was likely using mannequin hands until it developed something that was both useful and aesthetically pleasing:

Musk continued on the call last night that the Tesla team was confronted with an “incredibly difficult” challenge from an engineering perspective, and the hands and actuators for that specific part were tough to figure out:

“Making the hand and forearm, because most of the actuators, just like the human hand, the muscles that control your hand are actually primarily in your forearm. The Optimus hand and forearm is an incredibly difficult engineering challenge. I’d say it’s more difficult than the rest of the robot from an electromechanical standpoint. The forearm and hand are more difficult than the entire rest of the robot. But really, in order to have a useful generalized robot, you do need an incredible hand.”

The CEO continued that developing a useful and effective robot was “crucial to the future of the company,” and that he works with Optimus’s design team each Friday night.

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Elon Musk sets definitive Tesla Cybercab production date and puts a rumor to rest

“The single biggest expansion in production will be the Cybercab, which starts production in Q2 next year.” -Elon Musk

Published

13 hours ago

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October 23, 2025

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Credit: Teslarati

Tesla CEO Elon Musk finally set a definitive date for Tesla Cybercab production and, at the same time, put a substantial rumor regarding the vehicle that has been circulating within the community to rest.

Tesla’s Cybercab was unveiled last October as the company’s two-seater, affordable option that would ultimately be the car used for autonomous travel. It was initially slated for production in late 2025 or early 2026.

Tesla is ramping up its hiring for the Cybercab production team

However, Tesla has finally said it will start production of the Cybercab in Q2 2026, a more concrete date for the company, as it has moved the entire project forward in recent weeks by testing it at the Fremont Test Track and conducting crash safety assessments.

Musk said on the Q3 2025 Earnings Call:

“The single biggest expansion in production will be the Cybercab, which starts production in Q2 next year. That’s really a vehicle that’s optimized for full autonomy. It, in fact, does not have a steering wheel or pedals and is really an enduring optimization on minimizing cost per mile for fully considered cost per mile of operation.”

In that quote, Musk also put a rumor that has been circulating within the community to rest. Some started to speculate whether Cybercab would be sold with a steering wheel and pedals, as many of the elements of the car seemed to hint toward not being exclusively autonomous, including side mirrors being equipped, among other things.

It has been interesting to see some consider whether Tesla would sell the vehicle with the elements that would enable human control, especially as there have been a handful of images of the vehicle on company property with a steering wheel spotted.

However, Musk doubled down on the autonomous nature of the Cybercab with this confirmation during the earnings call, something that many investors likely wanted to hear because it was, in a way, a vote of confidence for the company’s path to autonomy.

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