NEW YORK, Oct. 15 -- Four astronauts came home from the Moon in April inside a capsule whose outer surface passed 4,000 degrees Fahrenheit while the cabin around them stayed in the mid-70s. On Thursday NASA said six months of inspection and testing had confirmed that the heat shield behind that contrast did what its engineers expected.

The finding bears on the next crewed flight, because Orion's reentry was the part of the flight NASA changed after the uncrewed Artemis I test, when the shield cracked and lost char.

The agency's own count tells the story. It found nine spots of char loss on the Artemis II heat shield dish, against 103 on Artemis I, and said cracking and char loss fell by a factor of ten. The remedy was a flight path, not...