Orion EM-1 Heat Shield Unbagging

Inside the high bay in the Neil Armstrong Operations and Checkout Building at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida, technicians with Lockheed Martin start to remove the protective covering from the Orion heat shield for Exploration Mission 1 (EM-1). The heat shield arrived aboard NASA’s Super Guppy aircraft at the Shuttle Landing Facility, managed and operated by Space Florida, from Lockheed Martin’s manufacturing facility near Denver. The Orion spacecraft will launch atop NASA’s Space Launch System rocket on EM-1, an uncrewed test flight, targeted for November 2018.