Posted on 04/02/2015 8:46:22 AM PDT by BenLurkin
Yes, shes a little worse for wear, isnt she? But then again, thats what atmospheric re-entry and 2200 °Celsius (4000 °Fahrenheit) worth of heat will do to you! Such was the state of the heat shield that protected NASAs Orion Spaceship after it re-entered the atmosphere on Dec. 5th, 2014. Having successfully protected the craft during its test flight, the shield was removed and transported to the Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, where it arrived on March. 9th.
Since that time, a steady stream of NASA employees have been coming by the facility to get a look at it while engineers collect data and work to repair it. In addition to being part of a mission that took human-rated equipment farther out into space than anything since the Apollo missions, the heat shield is also living proof that NASA is restoring indigenous space capability to the US.
First unveiled by NASA in May of 2011, the Orion Multi-Purpose Crew Vehicle (MPCV) was intrinsic to the Obama administrations plan to send astronauts to a nearby asteroid by 2025 and going to Mars by the mid-2030s. In addition to facilitating these long-range missions, the Orion spacecraft would also handle some of the routine tasks of spaceflight, such as providing a means of delivering and retrieving crew and supplies from the ISS.
(Excerpt) Read more at universetoday.com ...
Temperature is not heat, as anyone who puts out
a candle with their finger knows.
In 1962(?) Kennedy called for landing a man on the moon and returning him safely by the end of the decade. Had the current NASA leadership been around then we would have had Project Gemini somewere in the mid 1970’s and landed on the moon in the 80’s. Let private industry do it.
Had we the current White House leadership then we would all be speaking Russian today and stand in line to buy toilet paper.
Nah, we probably wouldn't even remember toilet paper because only the elite would have access to it, on the plus side newspapers would be make comeback............not for reading though.
He’s muslim, no toilet paper allowed.
I read an interesting idea about a spacecraft piggybacking on a hyperbolic asteroid. Hyperbolic asteroids and comets pass once through the inner Solar System before being flung out to interstellar space along s hyperbolic trajectory.
The spacecraft would be taken to rendezvous with the asteroid by a transport spaceship, so when it landed on, and attached itself to the asteroid, it would have maximum fuel for its thrusters and its ion drive.
Its thrusters would be used to slowly maneuver the likely rotating asteroid so that the spaceship would be at the relative “back” of the asteroid. Then its ion drive would very gradually increase the speed of the asteroid, so that by the time it reached interstellar space it would have tremendous velocity.
All of that for the primary purpose of using the asteroid as a shield against the vast number of other space bodies it would collide with.
Interesting!
Weren’t the old heat shields made of some kind of wood, like spruce?
I’m thinking 1960s era.
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