Orion Is Ready To Wear Its Shield

Orion Is Ready To Wear Its Shield

Image Cache: The Orion Exploration Mission 1 (EM-1) spacecraft is about to get its heat shield, which is manufactured in large part by Lockheed Martin. Building the heat shield involved a so-called out of autoclave (OOA) cure process, a high temperature, high pressure method for manufacturing composite materials, such as carbon fibre and epoxy resins.

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Orion’s heat shield is a stiffened skin design, and this curing process was the last step prior to attaching titanium stiffeners to the interior surface. Once the skin and stiffeners are attached, ablative material — called AVCOAT, used previously during Apollo missions — is applied to the exterior. In the rather impressive photo above we can see the heat shield being inspected by Lockheed engineers. Hot.

[Lockheed Martin]


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