Bob Novella

The heat shield is what keeps the Orion capsule, which is, again, this is where the humans are.

They're inside this capsule.

When they reenter the Earth's atmosphere, the heat shield is an ablative material that burns away as it protects the capsule from heat.

And on Artemis I, there was some char loss, which is essentially like, if you just think of it as them painting on

Imagine if it's a layer of black protective paint.

It's not that, but I'm just using it as something to think about.

And that protective layer is thick enough that as it enters the Earth's atmosphere, it wears away.

And there's still enough of it there to protect, but it is meant to displace heat by it burning away as they go.

Artemis I had some issues.

There was some of it that was flaking off.

It wasn't working properly.

They made an adjustment to the re-entry.

It...

On the surface, as far as the general public knows, it worked very well.

It did work very well.

But we don't know the details, and NASA is going to take a lot of time to analyze that to see how well it performed and if they do need to make a final decision to fix it or upgrade it or whatever.

I don't know if there were or not, Bob.

I think they were, though, because NASA had to replace tiles.

I don't know how extensively the replacement was, but I know that they did replace tiles.

So I guess there was some wear and tear on them, but I don't know if it was ablative.