Leonard David's INSIDE OUTER SPACE

Image credit: NASA/Brandon Torres Navarrete

Engineers at NASA’s Ames Research Center in California’s Silicon Valley report progress in installing a heat shield on the first private spacecraft targeted for Venus.

Rocket Lab of Long Beach, California is leading the effort, along with their partners at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Woven heat shield

NASA’s Heatshield for Extreme Entry Environment Technology (HEEET) was invented at the NASA Ames center

NASA’s Small Spacecraft Technology program, part of the agency’s Space Technology Mission Directorate, supported development of the heat shield for Rocket Lab’s Venus mission.

HEET is a textured material covering the bottom of the capsule (see above photo), a woven heat shield designed to protect spacecraft from temperatures up to 4,500 degrees Fahrenheit.

The private Venus probe would be deployed from Rocket Lab’s Photon spacecraft bus.

Image credit: Rocket Lab

This probe will take measurements as it descends through the clouds of Venus.

Morningstar missions

“We missed our January 2025 launch window and now wait until the next one summer 2026,” said MITs Sara Seager, a professor of planetary science, leader of the Morningstar Missions to Venus team – a series of planned missions designed to investigate the possibility of life in Venus’ clouds.

The first mission, a collaboration with Rocket Lab, is the small, low-cost probe designed to measure autofluorescence and backscattered polarised radiation to detect the presence of organic molecules in the clouds.

That spacecraft is now going on Rocket Lab’s yet-to-fly Neutron booster, instead of an Electron launcher, so the private Venus mission is tied to the Neutron coming online, Seager told Inside Outer Space.

“On my side we completed the instrument build and had our first integration tests with the probe, the part that will be dropped off into the Venus atmosphere. All is progressing,” said Seager.

Image credit: NASA/Ames Research Center

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