Comment by turtletontine

Someone please answer my obvious question. We sent successful missions to the moon sixty years ago. What heat shield material was used for the Apollo capsules, and why would we need something different now? Are the Artemis mission parameters totally different in a way that requires a new design? Or was Apollo incredibly dangerous and we got lucky they didn’t all fail catastrophically? The article mentions Orion is much heavier than the Apollo capsules, does that really require a totally novel heat shield that takes $billions to develop?