NASA’s Orion spacecraft is just about ready to turn up the heat. The spacecraft’s heat shield arrived at the agency’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida Wednesday night aboard the agency’s Super Guppy aircraft.
The heat shield, the largest of its kind ever built, is to be unloaded Thursday and is scheduled for installation on the Orion crew module in March, in preparation for Orion’s first flight test in September 2014.
The heat shield began its journey in January 2012 in Colorado, at Orion prime contractor Lockheed Martin’s Waterton Facility near Denver. That was the manufacturing site for a titanium skeleton and carbon fiber skin that give the heat shield its shape and provide structural support during landing. They were shipped in March to Textron Defense Systems near Boston, where they were used in construction of the heat shield itself.
Textron installed a fiberglass-phenolic honeycomb structure on the skin, filled each of the honeycomb’s 320,000 cells with the ablative material Avcoat, then X-rayed and sanded each cell to match Orion’s design specifications. The Avcoat-treated shell will shield Orion from the extreme heat it will experience as it returns to Earth. The ablative material will wear away as it heats up during Orion’s re-entry into the atmosphere, preventing heat from being transferred to the rest of the capsule.
The heat shield delivered to Kennedy will be used during Exploration Flight Test-1, a two-orbit flight that will take an uncrewed Orion capsule to an altitude of 3,600 miles. The returning capsule is expected to encounter temperatures of almost 4,000 degrees Fahrenheit as it travels through Earth’s atmosphere at up to 20,000 mph, faster than any spacecraft in the last 40 years.
00:00 – 04:45 Removal of heat shield from the oven
04:46 – 06:10 Visual inspection of heat shield
06:11 – 11:00 Transport of heat shield for x-ray testing
11:01 – 17:58 X-ray testing
17:58 – 19:01 Drilling repair openings for repair plugs
19:02 – 19:34 Final Sanding
19:35 – Transport of heat shield into paint booth
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