NASA faces tough decisions on Orion capsule's heat shield for Artemis moon missions

[Admin]

NASA remains in an ongoing test mode to determine what’s behind the ablative thermal protective material that chipped away unexpectedly from the Artemis 1 Orion heat shield during its reentry.

NASA faces tough decisions on Orion capsule's heat shield for Artemis moon missions : Read more

 

[Unclear Engineer]

I hope NASA has learned its lesson regrading the need to positively deal with small early indications of things that might become much larger issues - such as solid fuel rocket booster seal leaks and ice patches falling of the exteriors of propellant tanks and hitting vital reentry craft surfaces.

If you don't understand why it is happening, then you really do not understand how bad it can get.

 

[Dakota53]

I hope NASA has learned its lesson regrading the need to positively deal with small early indications of things that might become much larger issues - such as solid fuel rocket booster seal leaks and ice patches falling of the exteriors of propellant tanks and hitting vital reentry craft surfaces.

If you don't understand why it is happening, then you really do not understand how bad it can get.

Agree 100% - 300,000 individual honeycomb pieces sounds a lot more robust that 200 sectional pieces. Since we have had a tragedy in this area already with Columbia, one would hope the why, the how, and the fix is 100%

 

[palmerfralick]

you have to wonder with all the the new testing and analyzing of what went wrong with the current heat shield that if in the end they will waste more time and money than they would have if they had used the obviously successful Apollo 300K honeycomb method to begin with. If it aint broke
why try to make it cheaper?

 

[ultimatewizz]

Another problem with a product made by Boeing. They should not be allowed to make any thing for the space program, PERIOD. What is it going to take for NASA to dump them.

 

[ultimatewizz]

you have to wonder with all the the new testing and analyzing of what went wrong with the current heat shield that if in the end they will waste more time and money than they would have if they had used the obviously successful Apollo 300K honeycomb method to begin with. If it aint broke
why try to make it cheaper?

Haven't heard one complaint about anything SpaceX is sending up and bring back. Hmmm.

 

[Unclear Engineer]

I think the reason for the separately applied tiles is for reusability of the capsules.

 

[ultimatewizz]

I think the reason for the separately applied tiles is for re usability of the capsules.

Doesn't matter, Boeing is a disaster and SpaceX reuses booster and capsules and I believe they know more and find and fix their problems far quicker than Boeing. Musk has a good team in Texas.