Inflatable spacecraft makes successful splash landing

From launch to splashdown, all in under half an hour: not bad for an inflatable spacecraft.

This morning NASA's IRVE-3 – the third and heaviest of a series of inflatable re-entry vehicle experiments – successfully launched from NASA's Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia at 7:01 am local time. It landed in the Atlantic Ocean, off the coast of North Carolina, just 20 minutes later.

Like IRVE and IRVE-2 before it, IRVE-3 has an inflatable outer shell, which slows and protects the craft as it enters an atmosphere at hypersonic speeds.

In order to test the possibility of carrying heavier payloads through planetary atmospheres, IRVE-3 carried more than twice the payload of its predecessors and was installed with a heat shield, testing its ability to withstand atmospheric re-entry. The team also tweaked the craft's centre of gravity to see if this would lead to more precise manoeuvres than in previous tests.

'Perfect launch'

The vehicle travelled some 450 kilometres over the Atlantic Ocean, outside Earth's atmosphere. The 308-kilogram inflatable heat shield – or aeroshell – separated from the nose cone of its launch vehicle and was then inflated with nitrogen into a mushroom shape before falling through Earth's atmosphere.

"The launch went perfectly," says Stephen Hughes of NASA's IRVE-3 team.

Planned initially to enable the exploration of higher-altitude terrain on Mars, the IRVE-3 team is also anticipating its use as a link between here and the International Space Station, transferring waste and other cargo.

While the launch of IRVE-3 was not intended to show off a finished product, "it demonstrates that the technology is valid, and can be scaled up for future mission applications", says Hughes.

If you would like to reuse any content from New Scientist, either in print or online, please contact the syndication department first for permission. New Scientist does not own rights to photos, but there are a variety of licensing options available for use of articles and graphics we own the copyright to.

Have your say

Only subscribers may leave comments on this article. Please log in.

Only personal subscribers may leave comments on this article

Subscribe now to comment.

All comments should respect the New Scientist House Rules. If you think a particular comment breaks these rules then please use the "Report" link in that comment to report it to us.

If you are having a technical problem posting a comment, please contact technical support.