NASA Engineers Are Building an Ingenious Heat Shield That Inflates in Space

LOFTID is expected to launch in November aboard a United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket, alongside NOAA’s Joint Polar Satellite System-2, for a true test of its ability to survive atmospheric re-entry. After the NOAA payload separates from the Atlas V upper stage, LOFTID will inflate and reenter Earth’s atmosphere in a bid to see how successful the design is at slowing down and protecting sensitive payloads, like crewed spacecraft and robotic equipment, from the heat of reentry.

During suborbital tests, the system came in at “roughly 5,600 miles per hour or 2.5 kilometers per second, which is already difficult,” said Steve Hughes in a NASA press release. Hughes is a LOFTID aeroshell lead at NASA’s Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia. “But with LOFTID, we’ll be coming in at nearly 18,000 miles per hour, or 8 kilometers per second. That is about three times as fast, but that means nine times more energy.”

As NASA points out, the LOFTID system can include a variety of instruments and be scaled to different sizes depending on the scope of the mission. Long term, however, NASA specifically identifies its interest in how this technology could help protect future crewed missions to Mars.

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