This char then acts as a second heat barrier. NASA used the same heat shield design for Orion as the Apollo capsule. But during the Apollo missions, the char structure didn’t break like it did ...

The crash sites of most are known - but no-one is quite sure where the ascent stages of Apollo 11's module Eagle or Apollo 16's module Orion ended up.

Nasa’s Artemis programme, a follow-up to the Apollo moonshots of the late 1960s and early 1970s, has completed only one mission. An empty Orion capsule circled the moon in 2022 after blasting ...