NASA-Chef Jared Isaacman überprüft den Orion-Hitzeschild und drückt „volles Vertrauen“ darin für Artemis II aus

> However, toward the end of the meeting, the NASA team agreed to discuss something that “no one really liked to talk about.” This was an analysis of what would happen to Orion if large sections of the heat shield failed completely during Artemis II. Formally, this is known as a “damage tolerance evaluation,” the engineers said. Informally, it’s known as “What if we’re wrong.”

> The Avcoat blocks, which are about 1.5 inches thick, are laminated onto a thick composite base of the Orion spacecraft. Inside this is a titanium framework that carries the load of the vehicle. The NASA engineers wanted to understand what would happen if large chunks of the heat shield were stripped away entirely from the composite base of Orion. So they subjected this base material to high energies for periods of 10 seconds up to 10 minutes, which is longer than the period of heating Artemis II will experience during reentry.

> What they found is that, in the event of such a failure, the structure of Orion would remain solid, the crew would be safe within, and the vehicle could still land in a water-tight manner in the Pacific Ocean.

> “We have the data to say, on our worst day, we’re able to deal with that if we got to that point,” one of the NASA engineers said.

I did not know Orion was this resilient to reentry, but it fits with the pattern of Orion building on all the safety lessons of past spacecraft. One of the big things we got from Columbia was an understanding how the spacecraft and crew *could have* survived the off-nominal reentry with relatively simple design improvements, i.e. a more resilient hydraulic system and automatically pressurizing Launch and Entry Suits. It’s comforting to know Orion carries this level of redundancy