A fiberglass-phenolic honeycomb
structure is installed on the skin,
which holds 320,000 cells filled
with Avcoat—a specific ablative
heat shield material that will wear
away as it heats up during Orion’s
violent 4-mile-per-second re-entry
through Earth’s atmosphere. The
Avcoat will prevent heat from
being transferred to the rest of the
capsule, thus helping the spacecraft
to survive its intense fall and
splashdown in the Pacific Ocean.
One of the lesser known tests
for the upcoming EFT-1 flight will
demonstrate Orion’s ability to
operate after sustaining damage
from a micrometeoroid hit, a very
real threat to crews on any future
deep space missions. Two of Orion’s
970 protective space shuttle thermal
tiles, which make up the space
capsule’s cone-shaped back
shell, have holes in them to mimic
damage from a micrometeoroid hit.
Sensors on the vehicle will record
how high temperatures climb inside
the holes during Orion’s return,
which will inform future decisions
about what kind of damage may
warrant a repair in space when
Orion flies humans next decade.
Currently, the spacecraft is inside
the Launch Abort System Facility
(LASF) at KSC, where the last piece
of its flight hardware was recently
installed, the emergency launch
abort system (LAS). Orion is already
fueled with ammonia and hyperpropellants for its EFT-1 mission as
well, and will be transported to
nearby Cape Canaveral Air Force
Station Space Launch Complex
37B for stacking atop its Delta-IV
Heavy rocket around Nov. 10.
The enormous ULA Delta-IV Heavy
rocket Orion will leave Earth on is
now vertical on the launch pad
too, having moved there from its
nearby Horizontal Integration Facility
just a couple weeks ago after
ULA’s Delta launch team finished
conducting the final horizontal
processing of the triple-core booster.
The rocket’s upper stage, which
will fire after the initial launch to
send Orion farther into space than
any human spacecraft has gone in
four decades, arriv