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Comment by JumpCrisscross

4 days ago

> Orion that’s dodgy as fuck not the booster. I.e the new thing

I mean, newly shaped and partly reformulated.

Avcoat was “originally created…for the Apollo program” [1]. (“A reformulated version was used for the initial Orion heat shield and later for a redesigned Orion heat shield.”) The new things are Orion’s size and weight and the size of the tiles. All of which has precedented flight in Artemis I.

At the end of the day, I’m going to trust the astronauts. This issue was openly discussed, despite NASA’s original—and fair to criticize—instinct to cover it up. While any manned reëntry is a nail biter, I don’t think this one is especially so.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AVCOAT

Aren't astronauts by definition bat shit crazy? We have people lining up for one-way missions to Mars. Not to say this is a bad thing, but their ROI calculations are not normal.