Technologies for thermal protection systems applied on re-usable launcher

Abstract

The development of any future reusable launch vehicle (RLV) shall aim at a significant reduction of the payload transportation costs. One of the most expensive systems for any RLV is the thermal protection system (TPS), which protects the vehicle from the high thermal loads during re-entry. EADS ST is developing and qualifying TPS components and technologies for a wide range of applications and temperatures. As a part of the German National technology research programme ASTRA, these technologies were used for a TPS pre-design of the suborbital Hopper (Fig. 1) as a reference RLV system. On the basis of aerothermal re-entry loads determined by computational fluid dynamics methods, temperatures and heat loads during re-entry were determined for the entire vehicle. According to those findings, one or more possible TPS concepts were then pre-selected for the various vehicle areas according to the maximum temperatures. After the final selection (using trade-offs when necessary), a conservative estimate for expected TPS mass was established.