Artemis-2 Heat Shield Arrival

The heat shield for Orion’s Artemis 2 mission, NASA’s first crewed mission, arrives in its shipping container aboard NASA’s Super Guppy aircraft at the agency’s Kennedy Space Center Shuttle Landing Facility in Florida on July 9, 2019. The heat shield, measuring roughly 16 feet in diameter, will protect astronauts upon re-entry on the second mission of Artemis. The heat shield arrived from Lockheed Martin’s manufacturing facility near Denver. It will be offloaded and delivered to the Neil Armstrong Operations and Checkout facility high bay. The heat shield is a base titanium truss structure. Over the next several months, technicians will apply Avcoat, an ablative material that will provide the thermal protection. Artemis 2 will confirm all of the spacecraft’s systems operate as designed in the actual environment of deep space with astronauts aboard.