WASHINGTON — The success of a NASA project last year to demonstrate an inflatable heat shield has attracted interest from several companies who are working with the agency to advance the technology.
NASA flew last November the Low-Earth Orbit Flight Test of an Inflatable Decelerator (LOFTID) as a secondary payload on the Atlas 5 launch of the JPSS-2 weather satellite. LOFTID deployed an inflatable heat shield six meters across that survived reentry and splashed down in the Pacific Ocean.
Before the flight United Launch Alliance showed an interest in the technology as part of its Sensible Modular Autonomous Return Technology (SMART) concept for recovering the booster engine section of its Vulcan rocket, and helped support the LOFTID flight opportunity. ULA is now working with NASA through a Space Act Agreement on advancing the LOFTID technology.
The partnership with ULA would involve an aeroshell 10 meters across. “We’re currently working with them now designing that,” said Joe Del Corso, project manager for LOFTID at the Langley Research Center, during a Nov. 30 meeting of the NASA Advisory Council’s technology committee. That includes an upcoming preliminary design review of the larger aeroshell.
Going to that larger size, he said, involves increasing the diameter of the torus sections that make up the inflatable decelerator as well as inflating them to a higher pressure. “This is a huge jump in the technology, but they’re basically paying for it.”
ULA is not the only company that has approached NASA about the LOFTID technology. “These folks are coming to the table going, ‘Hey, we have an application. We see that it’s been used. You’ve validated the technology,’” he said.
Among them is Outpost, a startup proposing commercial reentry systems that would use inflatable systems like those on LOFTID. “We’re not sure whether they’re going to go forward,” Del Corso said of Outpost. “They’re a smaller…
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