Hypersonic vehicles and reusable spacecraft face severe heating environments as they traverse the atmosphere at high speed. In reusable applications a robust means for thermal protection is required. Traditional approaches use fragile materials in passive or ablative cooling schemes, but these approaches are fragile and susceptible to damage from handling, particle strikes, and other aspects of operation. Passive cooling approaches have catastrophic failure modes that result from small defects in the material surface. This aspect drives significant costs for inspection and handling. Ablative designs require significant post-flight refurbishment. As a result, neither one is traceable to rapid-turn-around reusable applications. A robust hypersonic heat shield is proposed to enable applications that offer significant advantages in the areas of Tactically responsive launch, Global space transport and delivery, and other stated Air Force and Space Force initiatives.
