Tuesday, July 24, 2012 - 6:45am
NASA is calling the test flight of its new heat shield made from high-tech balloons an "unqualified success." The small capsule, called the Inflatable Re-Entry Vehicle Experiment 3 (IRVE-3), deployed its inflatable heat shield and re-entered Earth's atmosphere from suborbital space at a screaming hypersonic speed of Mach 10.