Reentry
The hardest physics problem in spaceflight happens on the way down.
A returning vehicle has minutes to shed the energy of orbital speed. Nearly all of it turns into heat in a shock layer of plasma thousands of degrees hot, and one component stands between that plasma and the payload.
The heat shield
The single most critical subsystem on a return vehicle.
No redundancy and no second attempt. Yet today’s shields are slow to make, mostly built for a single flight, and slow, scarce and expensive to qualify.
Why now
Reentry is becoming routine.
1,000+
Launches and reentries a year
The U.S. range capacity target for 2030, up from 178 in 2025.
12+
Commercial return vehicles
Capsules, spaceplanes and cargo return, flying or in development.
5+
Commercial space stations
U.S. commercial stations in development to follow the ISS.
2030–31
Planned ISS deorbit
Two decades of cargo return give way to many new pipelines.
The bottleneck
None of today’s heat shield pipeline scales to a thousand reentries a year.
Slow to make
Shields are still largely built by hand, part by part, with long lead times.
Built for one flight
Most capsules return on ablative shields that burn away on the way down.
Hard to qualify
Facilities that can reproduce reentry heating are few, oversubscribed and expensive.
Vertically integrated
One team owns the heat shield, from raw material to qualified part.
01
Materials
We formulate and characterize our own thermal protection materials, designed for reuse and tuned to each mission’s heating profile.
02
Manufacturing
Additive manufacturing turns those materials straight into shield geometry, cutting cost and lead time and making small runs practical.
03
Hypersonic testing
In-house testing qualifies every design, so the loop from material to flight-ready part runs in one place instead of someone else’s queue.
Applications
Built for what’s coming home.
- Capsules
- Cargo return
- Spaceplanes
- Free-flyers
- Hypersonics
- Point-to-point cargo