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Thermal Protection System (Heat Shield) Development - Advanced Development Project

Author
Kowal, T. John
Published
October 13, 2010.
Physical Description
1 electronic document
Online Version

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Unclassified, Unlimited, Publicly available.
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Summary
The Orion Thermal Protection System (TPS) ADP was a 3 1/2 year effort to develop ablative TPS materials for the Orion crew capsule. The ADP was motivated by the lack of available ablative TPS's. The TPS ADP pursued a competitive phased development strategy with succeeding rounds of development, testing and down selections. The Project raised the technology readiness level (TRL) of 8 different TPS materials from 5 different commercial vendors, eventual down selecting to a single material system for the Orion heat shield. In addition to providing a heat shield material and design for Orion on time and on budget, the Project accomplished the following: 1) Re-invigorated TPS industry & re-established a NASA competency to respond to future TPS needs; 2) Identified a potentially catastrophic problem with the planned MSL heat shield, and provided a viable, high TRL alternate heat shield design option; and 3) Transferred mature heat shield material and design options to the commercial space industry, including TPS technology information for the SpaceX Dragon capsule.
Other Subject(s)
Collection
NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS) Collection.
Note
Document ID: 20100036525.
JSC-CN-21831.
Commercial Human Spaceflight Symposium; 13-14 Oct. 2010; Houston, TX; United States.
Terms of Use and Reproduction
No Copyright.
View MARC record | catkey: 15993885