The Horizon Europe Project

EFESTO-2 is the natural follow-on of the project EFESTO (H2020 grant 821801) and aims to increase the European know-how and technology capabilities in the Inflatable Heat Shields (IHS) field. It will lean on the great achievements obtained in the frame of the father project EFESTO by implementing the needed forward advance to improve the current TRL for future re-entry missions.

The project pillars are:

  1. to consolidate the use-case applicability through a deep business case analysis for a meaningful space application
  2. to extend the investigation spectrum of the father project “EFESTO” to other critical aspects of the IHS field
  3. to increase the confidence level and robustness of tools/models and know-how developed in the frame of the father project “EFESTO”
  4. to ensure continuity in presiding the IHS field in Europe among the scientific and industrial community

The inflatable heat shields can be considered a fundamental means to decelerate and protect the space system during re-entry, thus providing a key contribution to the functions of re-entry and descent. Therefore EFESTO-2 will satisfactorily fulfil the objectives of the Horizon Europe call “HORIZON-CL4-2021-SPACE-01-23”, contributing to the part of the scope strictly related to entry/descent systems and solutions.

The current initiative “EFESTO 2” aims at implementing the needed forward advance to improve the current TRL 4-5 reached in the father EFESTO project towards a TRL 5-6 level, as the necessary intermediate step between modern design capabilities and future IOD re-entry missions.