Development and Fabrication of Thermal Protection Systems for NASA: Enabling the Exploration of our Solar System

Spirit AeroSystems has been developing and fabricating light weight thermal protection systems for NASA missions since the mid-1990’s. Starting with the Stardust mission heatshield, FMI has produced three generations of PICA materials to support these missions. Since 2016, Spirit’s team has developed a 3rd generation of PICA material, or PICA-D, which will be used to build heatshields for the New Frontiers 4 Dragonfly mission to Titan and the Mars Sample Return Sample Return Lander (MSR-SRL) mission to Mars to retrieve the samples collected by the Perseverance rover since 2021. Following the technical qualification of PICA-D in collaboration with NASA Ames Research Center in 2022, the fabrication of the Dragonfly TPS materials was completed in 2023. Fabrication of PICA for MSR-SRL also began in 2023. Spirit has also developed a woven TPS material called 3MDCP, which is planned to be the forebody heatshield for MSR-EES. This paper presents the development of 3rd generation PICA and 3MDCP material systems, their manufacturing readiness level (MRL) maturity programs, and the fabrication results supporting these NASA planetary missions to date. The qualification of materials required extensive thermal and structural testing as well as representative environment testing. In addition to presenting the PICA-D and 3MDCP technical results, this paper summarizes the legacy of flight heatshield fabrication at Spirit for seven NASA missions, highlighting the development of the materials and manufacturing capabilities.