>> 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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