Research and Development of Thermal Protection Materials Applied in Deep Space Exploration

With deeper exploration in space, environment becomes more harsh, such as high temperature engine plume protection during flying, aerodynamic heating during re-entry, sunshine heating the vehicle during long time flying, the materials used in vehicles failed in high temperature environment in some planets. In this paper, information about advanced thermal protection materials (TPM) in home and aboard was presented, such as TPM used in Shenzhou capsule and a kind of novel light-weight and high- efficient TPM used in Orion, which could serve the future vehicles worked in adverse environment.