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NASA still doesn’t understand root cause of Orion heat shield issue (arstechnica.com)

submitted 7 months ago by llamacoffee@lemmy.world to c/spaceflight@sh.itjust.works

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[–] burble@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (1 children)

"Normalization of deviance"

I'm still worried that that's where this is all headed. I feel like if Dragon or Starliner had this issue, then there would be a strict requirement to make a new heat shield model and launch another uncrewed test flight to test it. It seems like they might be starting to try to weasel their way out of this one.

[–] Contextual_Idiot@sh.itjust.works 6 points 6 months ago

In this case, it sounds like the heat shield still performed and protected the craft. But since it burned in ways they didn't predict, they want to understand why first. They also delayed the next mission to give themselves time to understand what happened.

To me this sounds like they are making sure the heat shield will stand up to all the actual stresses it will be under and making sure they fully understand what those stresses are.