Artemis I heat shield spalling

1:17:52shield from Artemis 1 and what we can see is that this heat shield is covered by something called um the avo cat. It's an ablative thermal protection material. It's like the tiles on the back of the um space shuttle things like that. It's it's it's there to absorb a lot of heat and make sure that you know nothing burns up. Um what ended up happening with Artemis 1 was there were about 100 locations where the avo cat experienced severe spalling meaning chunks were sort of fractured and broke away. The The

1:18:32root cause is that the heat shield didn't maintain a high enough temperature to fully melt and it wasn't maintaining a high enough temperature to do that. And so, the solution now with Artemis 2, because it's got the same heat shield, the engineers have modified that re-entry procedure to steepen >> Oh, the initial angle of >> Not make it more shallow, actually steepen it to get it up to that high temperature so that it doesn't blow off. >> Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. >> It's actually designed to melt, and that's what they're doing with Artemis 2, okay? It hasn't been tested before, the steeper angle of entry, and so, um in a in a recent press conference, the NASA administrator, Jared Isaacman,

1:19:14like talked about that a little bit. >> Yes. >> And um I did I did see that. >> Yeah, yeah. And it was like, you know, he he said that I know that we've done all of the necessary calculations, >> backing the team. >> Yes. >> Uh multiple times >> Yeah, yeah, yeah. Totally backing their my guys. >> Yeah. >> We got it. >> Mhm. >> But he did have a sober uh tone uh about and I think part of it was playing with, you know, he's working in a dynamic where NASA's being systemically defunded for other things. >> Mhm.