I'm John Batchel. Behind the Black, Bob Zimmerman is here to take us to the solar system.

But first, we're going to stop on planet Earth because there's gathering questions raised about Artemis II.

And Bob is going to educate us about what are the risks.

Bob, a very good evening to you.

Artemis II, what is it and what is it concern?

Artemis II is the next mission to on the whole Artemis program to get to the moon.

It is scheduled to begin to fly sometime in the next three months.

NASA has got the SLS rocket stacked, the Orion capsule on top.

They've already done a dress rehearsal.

It will send four astronauts around the moon, sling them around the moon, and bring them back to Earth.

It's basically a duplication of the 22

unmanned mission, but this time they put four people on it. Well, I've got an op-ed today at PJ Media

where I am basically begging Donald Trump and Gerard Isaacman, NASA administrator, to take the crew

off this mission. And your listeners and my readers

are behind the black will know most of these issues. When Orion went in 22 on that unmanned

mission, when it came back, it came back with serious damage to the heat shield, much more than they expected. In fact,

large chunks came off. NASA has not changed the heat shield. To fix or replace the heat shield

would cause several years delay in the program. It instead decided it's going to fly the next

mission with the same

type of heat shield, but change the flight directory slightly in a way that they think will

reduce the damage. Now, that might be true, but they don't really understand why this heat shield

had these problems with chunks breaking off, and to put crew on a mission to the

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