Engineers at NASA's Langley Research Center in Virginia received a challenging assignment in 2011: Design a barrier to keep propellant gases from accumulating near Orion astronauts before and during their ride atop a Space Launch System rocket.Now, a decade later, an updated version of this Langley design is poised to be demonstrated on an SLS rocket for the first time in the uncrewed Artemis I mission scheduled for February 2022. Once NASA begins crewed Artemis flights, the barrier's role will be one of life and death, and its development story is fittingly complex given those stakes.
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