The Shuttle’s Thermal Protection System (TPS) By Dennis R. Jenkins Originally found at: https://history.nasa.gov/sts1/pages/tps.html During the original studies of lifting-reentry vehicles during the late 1950s and 1960s, there had been a great debate over the relative merits of active cooling systems versus passive systems for the vehicle structure. The active systems were attractive—on paper—but nobody could quite figure out how to make them work. Therefore, the choices were largely narrowed to either a hot-structure, like that used on the X-15, or a more conventional structure protected by some sort of…
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