14 DAY TRIAL // Officials at NASA announce that engineers at the Kennedy Space Center (KSC), in Florida, are currently removing the heat shield that will go on the first Orion Multipurpose Crew Vehicle (MPCV). The shield arrived in Florida on Wednesday, and was removed from its airplane yesterday, December 5.
The NASA Super Guppy aircraft is designed specifically to carry atypical loads. The outsize cargo freight vehicle is manufactured by Aero Spacelines, which has produced several variants for the American space agency and other customers to date.
The heat shield, arguably one of the most advanced ever built, began its journey towards the KSC in January, when it was delivered from the Lockheed Martin Waterton Facility, near Denver, Colorado to a Textron Dense Systems facility, near Boston, Massachusetts.
This particular heat shield is meant to go on an unmanned version of the Orion space capsule during its first maiden flight, scheduled for late 2014. The shield will be installed onto the spacecraft inside a KSC facility, starting March 2014. Orion will eventually be used for manned missions to near-Earth asteroids, by 2025, and for a flight to Mars, by the early 2030s.