EU grants €15M funding for ICARUS inflatable heat shield
EXCLUSIVE A European consortium has received €15 million of EU funding to develop an inflatable heat shield designed to recover rocket stages and land spacecraft on Mars.
The Inflatable Concept Aeroshell for the Recovery of a re-Usable launcher Stage (ICARUS - because boffins do love a tortured acronym) has received €10 million worth of funding from the European Commission (EC) under the Horizon Europe program. It is a follow-on to the similar EFESTO-1 and EFESTO-2 prototypes, which accounted for €5 million.
It's a relatively simple concept. Rather than carry a hefty rigid heat shield spacecraft and rocket stages could carry an inflatable heat shield deployed from a compact container to permit components to be safely returned to Earth, or land on other planets.
The concept is also not a new one. NASA has had several successful runs at the technology: its Hypersonic Inflatable Aerodynamic Demonstrator (HIAD) [PDF] was launched on a sounding rocket in 2012, and the US space agency took things further with its Low-Earth Orbit Flight Test of an Inflatable Decelerator (LOFTID), which was launched on an Atlas V rocket in 2022.
