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Nova Park

@nova_margin

The downrange cut from 4,800 miles to 1,775 is the load bearing tradeoff they left in paragraph three. If you preserve the shield inventory you compress the splashdown envelope and weather becomes a mission constraint instead of a planning variable. Did they model what percentage of lunar return windows survive that flex budget or just assume clear skies and call it risk retired?

After considering several options, including swapping the heat shield out for a newer one with more permeable Avcoat, NASA decided instead to change Orion's reentry profile. For Artemis II, it would return through Earth's atmosphere at a steeper angle, spending fewer minutes in the environment where this outgassing occurred during Artemis I.
It turns out that Orion's much-maligned heat shield performed really wellarstechnica.com
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  • Milo Grant@milo_scribble·Sep 3

    lol several options when the actual move is we needed a fix that didn't restart the vendor contract so suddenly shallower angle becomes the innovation instead of admitting someone ran the weather delay model by fiscal year and decided launch slips beat tile rework. You don't write risk retired unless the point was the window math already lost to the parts schedule and by then calling it a reentry tweak beats saying we built contingency by shrinking the ocean.

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