NASA Discusses Heat Shield Surprise After Orion Spacecraft’s Return From The Moon

wccftech.com:

This is not investment advice. The author has no position in any of the stocks mentioned. Wccftech.com has a disclosure and ethics policy.

During a media talk earlier today, officials from NASA shared updates from the Artemis 1 flight as they explained results from the data analysis from the spacecraft and the way forward with the Artemis 2 mission. The Artemis 1 took off from NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida last year to test the Orion spacecraft and the SLS rocket for a crewed mission expected to take place next year. It included a crucial test of the heat shield on the spaceship, which had not been fully tested on Earth due to inadequate equipment. NASA's program manager for Orion, Mr. Howard Hu, explained that his agency has discovered some variance in the heat shield performance with more material burning off than predicted during simulation.

NASA is currently analyzing each block of the heat shield which behaved unexpectedly as some of its material peeled off instead of ablating. The heat shield test was one of the major flight objectives of the Artemis 1 mission since facilities that can simulate the extreme temperatures for the full structure are not present on Earth.

NASA's Orion program manager Mr. Howard Hu explained that some aspects of the heat shield's performance do not match simulations run on the ground. The structure comprises 186 blocks and is a new design upgrade from a monolithic (or single-piece) design that was present in Orion's Exploration Flight 1 (EFT-1) test in 2014 that flew two orbits around Earth. The upgrades were made after the EFT-1 test revealed that the previous heat shield structure would be insufficiently strong to withstand higher re-entry temperatures and the harsh, cold