Heat shields are designed to protect the surface and cargo of a spacecraft as it enters an atmosphere. Aerospace engineers in ...

Within hours of NASA announcing its decision to fly the Artemis II mission aboard an Orion spacecraft with an unmodified heat shield, critics assailed the space agency, saying it had made the wrong ...

The heat shield on Orion is made of 186 blocks of a special material called AVCOAT, which is designed to both provide insulation against the heat, and to burn off in a controlled, predictable way, ...