Cargo ships like this one end their missions by burning up, and the station itself will one day be steered into a destructive re-entry by a deorbit vehicle SpaceX is building for NASA<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n “It’s a smart way to get flight data on materials that are still in development,” said Keith Peterson, a materials engineer at NASA’s Ames Research Center in California’s Silicon Valley. “We’re essentially hitching a ride on a vehicle that’s already coming back to Earth.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n The capsule program is led by Alexandre Martin, the Ervin J. Nutter Professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering at the University of Kentucky.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Stan Bouslog, a thermal protection system senior discipline expert at Johnson who served as NASA’s technical monitor for the previous flight, made the case for flying in 2024. “The only way to ‘test like you fly’ a thermal protection system is to expose it to actual hypersonic flight through an atmosphere,” he said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The lineup includes the ceramic tile material used on the space shuttle. One capsule carries the 3D-printed shield from the Additive Manufacturing of Thermal Protective Systems project of NASA Johnson and Oak Ridge National Laboratory.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Ames contributed two capsules flying MERINO, or Materials Engineered for Re-entry using Innovative Needling Operations. NASA says these layers of carbon and phenolic fibers, “stitched together like felt,” are “more flexible, faster to produce, and less expensive than traditional protective substances,” which makes them “promising candidates for Mars missions,” even though the agency still has no year for a first human Mars landing<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n A dual-cone capsule pairs a tungsten tip with a rear cone wrapped in MERINO, and according to NASA, “this unique design will validate computer models against real-world data.” Another copies the aeroshell of NASA’s Dragonfly rotorcraft, bound for Titan<\/a>, and is covered in Phenolic Impregnated Carbon Ablator, the Ames material that flew on Stardust, Mars Science Laboratory and Mars 2020.<\/p>\n\n\n\n One more tests an umbrella-like deployable heat shield, the Adaptable Deployable Entry and Placement Technology. NASA says the full-scale version “could be folded, making it ideal for deploying payloads that are larger than the rockets that launch them into flight.”<\/p>\n\n\n\nShuttle tiles, printed shields and felt-like carbon<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
![\"Ames-made](\"https:\/\/www.ecoticias.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/10\/ames-heat-shield-krepe-capsule.jpg\")
Capsules that can relay each other’s data<\/h2>\n\n\n\n