Some time during the first week of April, a 322-foot NASA rocket is scheduled to blast off from the Kennedy Space Center and soar deep into outer space, carrying its crew of four astronauts farther from Earth than humans have been in half a century. The Orion space capsule will loop around the moon, passing within 5,000 miles of the cratered surface, and then return to Earth. Turning its heat shield to the upper atmosphere, it will use aerodynamic braking to slow from a speed of 25,000 mph to just 300 mph, at which point it will deploy parachutes and splash down in the Pacific. Humanity will have returned to the moon and come home safely again.

That’s what NASA’s experts say will happen, anyway.

A guy on the internet disagrees.

Charles Camarda, a 73-year-old retiree living in Virginia, has been posting on LinkedIn and X, saying NASA has miscalculated and the Artemis II rocket could fail catastrophically. To be clear, he is one guy, posting as a private citizen, with no institutional backing and no notable public figures standing by his side. It’s just him, one of a bazillion lone voices on the internet trying to set the world straight.

But one thing is different about Camarda that sets him apart from all those other dudes and makes his quixotic quest worth paying attention to: There is not a single person on Earth more qualified on this particular subject than he is.

“People need to listen to Charlie because he knows what he’s talking about,” says Eileen Collins, the former astronaut who made history as the first female commander of a space-shuttle mission. “He’s a high-integrity person, and his technical background is very deep.”

The subject Camarda is the world’s leading expert on is thermal protection systems, also known as heat shields, in particular the question of whether they’re capable of keeping human beings from being killed by the heat and violence of reentry from space into Earth’s atmosphere.

Born in Queens, Camarda got his Ph.D. in aerospace engineering from Virginia Polytechnic in 1990 and then was hired by NASA, where he studied thermal protection systems for space shuttles before joining the astronaut program in 1996.

Camarda’s expertise would prove timely. On February 1, 2003, Space Shuttle Columbia disintegrated as it reentered Earth’s atmosphere, killing all seven astronauts onboard. It turned out a chunk of protective foam had fallen off the main fuel tank during takeoff and hit the thermal protection material on the leading edge of the spacecraft’s left wing. It left a hole the size of a pizza box, and during reentry hot gases entered the gap and........

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