A United Launch Alliance Atlas 5 is scheduled to lift off from Vandenberg Space Base in California at 4:25 a.m. Eastern on November 10. The rocket’s main payload is the Joint Polar Satellite System (JPSS) 2 weather satellite, which will be placed in a polar orbit to collect weather data for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. The launch was previously scheduled for November 1, but was postponed to replace a battery in the Centaur rocket’s upper stage. A secondary payload during the JPSS-2 launch is the low Earth orbit flight test of an inflatable decelerator (LOFTID), a NASA technology demonstration. While JPSS-2 will deploy nearly half an hour after launch, LOFTID will remain attached to Centaur until 75 minutes after liftoff, after Centaur burns from orbit. Just prior to deployment, LOFTID will inflate a re-entry shield to a six-meter diameter. This heat shield will slow the vehicle from orbital speed to Mach 0.7 as onboard instruments collect data on the shield’s performance. LOFTID will then deploy parachutes to slow it down for the remainder of its descent, launching into the Pacific east of Hawaii to be retrieved by a ship. LOFTID is the latest in a series of technology demonstrations by NASA for inflatable reentry systems whose size is not limited by the rocket’s payload fairing. “Right now, using rigid technologies, we’re limiting the size of the airgun itself to fit in the fairing of a launch vehicle,” or no more than five meters wide, said Joe Del Corso, LOFTID project manager at NASA’s Langley Research Center. , during a pre-launch update in October. This limits the size of payloads delivered to the Martian surface to about 1.5 metric tons. A larger aircraft, using inflatable technology, could allow much heavier payloads, up to the range of 20 to 40 metric tons. “It’s what you need to put people on Mars,” he said. Larger aircraft also allow access to higher ground on Mars where the atmosphere is not dense enough to slow vehicles with existing systems. NASA hopes to gather performance on inflatable heat shields with the LOFTID test. John DiNonno, LOFTID chief engineer at NASA Langley, said the heat shield will see peak temperatures of more than 1,400 degrees Celsius during re-entry and experience decelerations of up to 9g. The inflatable structure is protected by a flexible thermal protection system made of materials that can be adapted for the specific mission. A ship off the coast of Hawaii will recover the LOFTID after a crash, but as a precaution the vehicle will eject data recorders while descending under separately recoverable parachutes. It will also return some limited real-time data. “We should be able to get some preliminary feedback within at least two hours of re-entry as to whether it was successful or not,” Del Corso said. LOFTID cost NASA nearly $93 million over five years, said Trudy Cortes, director of technology demonstrations in NASA’s Space Technology Mission Directorate. NASA is also partnering with ULA on the mission through an unfunded Space Act agreement, with ULA supporting the integration of LOFTID into Centaur, as well as the parachute system and recovery ship. The LOFTID mission is officially dedicated to Bernard Kutter, a ULA engineer who worked on advanced technologies but died unexpectedly in 2020. John Reed, ULA’s chief technologist, said his company is interested in LOFTID as part of the company’s Sensible Modular Autonomous Return Technology (SMART) reuse concept for the Vulcan rocket. According to the SMART approach, the engine section of the Vulcan booster would detach after stage separation and deploy an inflatable air chamber to slow it down on re-entry. A parachute would slow down the engine section in the final stages of descent. He said the company is also interested in broader commercial applications of the technology. “The whole focus of this effort has been to develop a pathway that can support not only us, but commercial LEO applications, cislunar product return, as well as access to Mars and lower mass that will really enable the extension of humanity’. These future applications will require much larger aircraft than the six meter version being tested at LOFTID. In a briefing during the AIAA ASCEND conference on Oct. 25, Michelle Munk, acting architect at NASA’s Space Technology Directorate, estimated that ULA will likely need a 12- to 14-meter-wide airfoil, while Mars landers may need versions up to 16 meters. “We have in our development strategy scaled flight tests,” he said, which will also make the inflatable aircraft more robust and include integrated guidance, navigation and control needed for missions to Mars. He added that he expected any ULA testing of larger inflatable decelerators would support NASA’s plans for Mars. “We’ll get several flights of the supersonic inflatable aerodynamic retarder that will be equipped and give us increased data sets about its performance in the flight environment that we can use to build confidence and make improvements,” he said. These future tests by ULA, he said, will also help retain vendors that produce key inflatable airframe components that NASA will rely on for future missions. “We think this is a wonderful partnership and a way to maintain the supply chain and continue learning as we move, long-term, toward a mission to Mars.” Cortes said it is too early to determine when an inflatable decelerator might be used on a Mars mission. “This is risk reduction,” he said. After LOFTID, “there’s a scale that we would start talking about, start working on.”
