Tuesday, May 08, 2007

NASA Seeking Alternate Heat Shields?

SpaceToys.com Authentic NASA Toys and Replicas
Despite the treacherous journey up, one of the greatest dangers of space travel involves re-entry, as Columbia unfortunately demonstrated. Now it seems as if NASA is selecting several companies to develop "alternative heat shields" as insurance, just in case the primary ones fail.

(United Press International) NASA has selected The Boeing Co. and the Textron Systems Corp. to develop alternate heat shield materials for the Orion crew exploration spacecraft.

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration said the contracts will support development and testing of three alternative heat shield materials that would be used if there are difficulties with the primary material.


This is probably a wise thing for NASA, as it can ill-afford another space tragedy on its books. Although these alternative heat shields are intended for "general Earth use," this technology could be easily adapted for future Martian missions in the distant future, not to mention Titan as well.




Want more space geek news? Then subscribe below via email, RSS or twitter for free updates!

Enter your email address:

Delivered by FeedBurner

Prefer another service? How about via RSS or follow Colony Worlds on Twitter!

1 comment:

  1. Maybe they should be looking at Troy Hurtubise's fire paste as a simple alternative. The Discovery Channel filmed an interview with him wearing a helmet coated in the paste, while TDC's film crew aimed a blowtorch at his head for ten minutes (Discovery Channel supplied the blowtorch). The stuff is about three orders of magnitude cheaper than the tiles used on the shuttle orbiters.

    ReplyDelete

You can either visit the stars or watch them from afar.

But if you choose the former, you'll definitely get a better view.

~Darnell Clayton, 2007

Note: You do not need a Blogger account in order to comment, but you do need to solve the universal puzzle below.