This is actually good to see. They are not merely accepting the risk to the heat shield, they are searching for the root cause to the problem. NASA is keeping the Challenger and Columbia disasters in mind while designing and launching the Artemis missions.
“Normalization of deviance”
I’m still worried that that’s where this is all headed. I feel like if Dragon or Starliner had this issue, then there would be a strict requirement to make a new heat shield model and launch another uncrewed test flight to test it. It seems like they might be starting to try to weasel their way out of this one.
In this case, it sounds like the heat shield still performed and protected the craft. But since it burned in ways they didn’t predict, they want to understand why first. They also delayed the next mission to give themselves time to understand what happened.
To me this sounds like they are making sure the heat shield will stand up to all the actual stresses it will be under and making sure they fully understand what those stresses are.
