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>> Hi, my name is Molly White
and I'm a heat shield engineer for Orion.
The Orion spacecraft is designed to go further
than humans ever have before, and the further out you go,
the faster you come back,
and the faster you come back, the hotter you get.
So Orion needs a really, really good heat shield
to protect its crew from that really,
really hot air that's going to be around it when it comes back.
Why Orion needs a heat shield.
If we think about friction
and I'm moving my hands past each other.
just moving them pretty slowly,
I can still feel heat build up between my hands.
It gets hotter.
Well, if we think about Orion, which is going 25
to 30 times the speed of sound, it has that same friction
with the air, only it's going way faster than my hands can.
So there's a lot of heat that is around Orion
that it needs to be protected from.
The heat shield for Orion, it's 16.5 feet in diameter.
It's the largest,
most innovative heat shield of its kind.
The heat shield weighs about 1,000 pounds.
The total vehicle mass is about 20,000 pounds,
so it's about 1/20th the weight of Orion just
for the heat shield itself.
So Orion, for its first flight test,
will see surface temperatures at around 4,000 degrees Fahrenheit.
So we developed new materials for Orion
that can withstand those higher temperatures.
The material for Orion is actually designed to withstand
up to 6,000 degrees Fahrenheit.
My favorite part of working
on Orion is just the fantastic group of really,
really smart people that I get to work with every day.
They're excited and passionate as I am
about taking humans further than we ever have before,
bringing back all the technology in everything
that we've developed out there back here
to Earth just to improve our lives.
And that's the thing that I get most excited
about when coming to work.
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