Sweating spacecraft may be the key to greener space travel
https://www.newsweek.com/sweating-spacecraft-may-key-greener-space-travel-2066418
Sweating spacecraft may be the key to greener space travel
https://www.newsweek.com/sweating-spacecraft-may-key-greener-space-travel-2066418
4 Comments
By Eileen Falkenberg-Hull — Senior Editor, Autos |
Space junk surrounds us. The European Space Agency estimates that there are approximately 130 million pieces of space junk from the over 6,800 successful rocket launches that have occurred since 1957. The South Pacific Ocean Uninhabited Area (SPOUA), a region near Point Nemo, is called the spacecraft cemetery as it is where those craft are routinely crashed at the end of their usefulness. Orbital debris falls into the Earth’s atmosphere and burns up on its way back down.
Until recently, marked notably by the multiple successes by SpaceX, many spacecraft have been one-and-done use cases. The longest-serving spacecraft in history, the space shuttle Discovery, only flew a few dozen times before it was retired in 2011.
Scientists at Texas A&M University’s Department of Aerospace Engineering are working to develop and test a 3D-printed material that aims to make spacecraft reusable and space travel greener in partnership with Canopy Aerospace.
Read more: [https://www.newsweek.com/sweating-spacecraft-may-key-greener-space-travel-2066418](https://www.newsweek.com/sweating-spacecraft-may-key-greener-space-travel-2066418)
Weird way to say they’re in the early stages of testing active gas cooling of spacecraft structures during hypersonic reentry. Frankly, not a bad idea, but because it is an active safety system and not a passive one, I wouldn’t expect to see this entirely replace ablative heat tiles anytime soon. When the risk of your system failing is hull loss, you need redundancy to guarantee safety and reliability.
The space shuttles heat shield was made out of Carbon carbon and silica and could be reused. So its more then possible to make heat shields reusable
Active cooling is already being explored by SpaceX and Stoke, including transpiration cooling (and similar) as described in the article. Blue Origin may even get in on it when they get around to their reusable upper stage. So the ending line about hoping to see it come into play by the end of one of the author’s lifetimes sounds a bit pessimistic. Unless active cooling is prohibitively difficult, it should see use well before the end of the decade.