Teams work to complete the installation of the heat shield on the Artemis III Orion spacecraft inside the high bay of the Neil A. Armstrong Operations and Checkout Building at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida on Monday, July 6, 2026. Orion’s heat shield consists of 186 blocks of an ablative material called Avcoat, with each block meticulously and individually inspected. The heat shield is responsible for protecting the astronauts from the extreme temperatures as they reenter Earth’s atmosphere at the end of the mission.