EFESTO-2 Project Advances Inflatable Heat Shield Technology in Europe
EFESTO-2, the natural follow-on of the successful Horizon 2020 project EFESTO, has completed its first checkpoint towards increasing European knowledge and technology capabilities in the field of Inflatable Heat Shields (IHS). The project aims to improve the current TRL for future re-entry missions by building on the achievements obtained in the father H2020 project EFESTO.
The EFESTO-2 project is expected to expand commercial space transportation offers and services by maturing Inflatable Heat Shields and enabling their applicability to recovery and reuse launcher stages. The project also aligns with the EU Green Deal objective by reducing the environmental impact of space debris and chemical propulsion.
The project pillars include consolidating the use-case applicability through a business case analysis for a meaningful space application, extending the investigation spectrum of the father project EFESTO to other critical aspects of the IHS field, increasing the confidence level and robustness of tools/models and know-how developed in the frame of the father project EFESTO, and ensuring continuity in presiding the IHS field in Europe among the scientific and industrial community.
EFESTO-2 has received funding from the European Union's Horizon Europe research and innovation program under grant agreement No 1010811041.
The project completed the first checkpoint by assessing the completion of work package 2, a business case analysis (BCA) to identify the most appealing use-case application and feed the subsequent design study for a reference mission/system. The project has also started work package 3, a design definition with the objective of defining a mission operation concept along with a reference system configuration to characterize the operative environment for the inflatable heat shield and to properly feed the testing effort in the second half of the project.
EFESTO-2 will contribute to the scope strictly related to entry/descent systems and solutions, and it is expected to positively impact the space industry and reduce its environmental impact. More information about the project can be found on the project website (http://www.efesto-project.eu/) or on the Community Research and Development Information Service (CORDIS), the European Commission's primary source of results from the projects funded by the EU's framework programmes for research and innovation.
