NASA successfully tests the world’s first inflatable heat shield

NASA is a step closer to landing even larger vehicles on Mars than they have in the past after the agency announced that they successfully launched an inflatable heat shield technology demonstrator called LOFTID into space and back, with the mission marking a key moment in NASA's long journey to eventually bring humans to Mars.

Splashdown of the Low-Earth Orbit Flight Test of an Inflatable Decelerator was nose down, which was exactly as planned. It even inflated in the ocean, roughly 500 miles (800 km) away from Hawaii — a bonus milestone for the engineering team.

The Future of Space, by Futurist Matthew Griffin

"This is one of the most critical technologies that we're establishing right now with this mission, and also with that first successful orbital flight and recovery," Jim Reuter, NASA's associate administrator for the space technology mission directorate, said during the NASA Television livestream just after the splashdown.

After deployment in space, NASA visually confirmed via the video livestream the full inflation of LOFTID at about 78 miles (125 km) in altitude, marking the beginning of the re-entry. Telemetry was briefly lost as the demonstrator made its way back to Earth, but everything turned out well in the end.

The inflatable technology splashed down just 5 miles (8 km) from the Kahana II recovery vessel, allowing for an easy retrieval, and LOFTID jettisoned its flight recorder as planned for data collection.

See the breakthrough test

"This is a great, great opportunity to get flight data and see how it actually performed," Greg Swanson, LOFTID instrumentation lead at NASA's Ames Research Center, said during the same livestream. "We know it performed well enough to make it great," he added of the mission.

The $93 million LOFTID, which launched alongside the Joint Polar Satellite System-2 (JPSS-2), is an expandable aeroshell designed to slow a spacecraft's entry through the Martian sky and reduce the amount of heat created by atmospheric friction. NASA says the tech represents one solution to landing in the ultra-thin Martian atmosphere, which makes landings especially delicate because spacecraft encounter only a fraction of drag compared to Earth's atmosphere.

Parachutes are not enough to get even smaller payloads down on Mars; for example, the golf-cart-sized Spirit and Opportunity rovers tumbled upon the surface in a set of air bags that softened the fall. The larger Curiosity and Perseverance rovers required a rocket-powered sky crane to bring the SUV-sized vehicles to the surface.

The sky crane probably hit its maximum in getting the 1-ton masses of each of the two larger rovers down to the surface, however, which is why NASA is testing out this  inflatable aeroshell to land humans and the cargo they require to live on the Red Planet. The flying saucer shape is designed to squeeze into a conventional rocket during launch, but expand and inflate when they arrive at the Red Planet and its atmosphere - parachutes would also be used to ensure the payload's safe arrival on Mars.

To be sure though, Mars human landing dates remain far in the future still while NASA remains focused on its Artemis program.