The timber yard around the corner sells a set of flags like this with which to stylishly pave the back garden... a circular table at its centre perhaps for the glass of Pimms in the sunshine.
This tho' is the heat-shield from the top end of Artemis 2, adorning the ass of the uppermost capsule that contains the astronauts and which they rely upon during re-entry.
The figure to remember should anyone ask you about re-entering the atmosphere from a trip to the Moon is twenty-five. You'll be travelling at 25,000 m.p.h. and the temperature of that surface will be around 2,500°C... and what lies between you and that super-heated sauna is 25% plastic.
What most strikes you about space-flight is the level of near-perfection required in its attention to detail. The far depths of the oceans and farthest reaches of the sky are as unforgiving in physical terms as anywhere on the planet; as the losses of the Titan submarine and Columbia space-shuttle attest.
I always figured these tiles were ceramic, so that for future commercial off-the-shelf builds you could drop by Home Depot to search among kitchen and bathroom tiles.
What they are instead is a sort of cake-mix of epoxy resin, plus glass microspheres and silica fibres. These are popped into a form of baking-tray in the shape of a steel hexa-comb like honey-bees make, and then popped into an autoclave on low temp while you join friends at the pub for pre-meal drinks.
Artemis 2 (crewed) was preceded by Artemis 1 (uncrewed), with which they would experiment with a single-skip entry to Earth's atmosphere ~ like a pebble on a pond ~ with which to help reduce the speed. Except what it meant was that gases crept into the seams of the tiles and expanded upon re-entry to blow parts of the tiles off.
What they told the crew prior this month's re-entry therefore was that they'd go for a 'ballistic' or full-on entry instead. Which is one reason why what the astronauts do is sit down with the kids and the household paperwork, explaining what to do with it should tiles designed to a 1960s recipe fail.
Incidentally the difference with moonshots is that unlike a return from orbiting the Earth, there's an extra 8000 m.p.h. to dispose of; and the best way of imagining it is that the gravitational pull of the planet acts not unlike a coin-vortex. What you're on is effectively the solar system's biggest roller-coaster, because it's all uphill for a small part of the way leaving the Moon, and accelerating downhill for the remainder.
Used to tell my own child at amusement parks how coin-vortices were ideal means of visualising the warping of gravitational fields as suggested by Einstein; he turning to me as often as not to say "Yeah right, loser."
