Building on NASA’s work, manufacturers began experimenting with different metals on a variety of polymer thin films. Metallized Mylar turned out to reflect heat just as well as it did radio transmissions, and NASA researchers found that when sheets were layered half an inch thick without touching each other, it created an insulation vastly more effective per pound than any other in the vacuum of space.Īs the Space Agency began adapting this new class of insulation to various uses, NASA and its contractors made advances on virtually all fronts, including tensile strength, fabrication and application techniques, testing procedures, predictive modeling of performance, and fine-tuning of materials and configurations. One of its earliest uses was in NASA’s Echo 1 satellite balloon, an early communications satellite that used the material’s reflectiveness to bounce radio and radar signals back to Earth. The first metallized polyester thin film was created in the late 1950s by depositing vaporized aluminum onto Mylar in a vacuum. Mylar is a trade name for a remarkably thin, lightweight, and durable polyester film developed by DuPont in the mid-1950s. The latter, known as NRC-2, became the model for a host of “superinsulation” materials that would find a multitude of uses in space and on Earth. The first such multilayer reflective insulations were created under contract to Marshall Space Flight Center in the mid-1960s, when the Linde Division of Union Carbide Corporation delivered a series of insulations made with layers of thin aluminum foils and sheets of fiberglass, and the Metallized Products Division of National Research Corporation created an insulation made from sheets of crinkled, aluminized Mylar. But NASA mastered reflective insulation, turning it into a versatile and extremely effective technology now known as radiant barrier.Ī key innovation was layering lightweight, reflective materials to increase their insulating power. Reflective surfaces had been added to some building insulation and were used in Thermos bottles, for example. They had to find another way.īy the time the Space Program got underway, engineers were already working with insulation that reflected radiated heat, rather than simply damping conduction. But NASA engineers calculated early in the Space Program that to insulate a spacesuit against the temperature extremes of space, conventional insulation would have to be several feet thick. Cloth and fiberglass are poor heat conductors, as are the pockets of air they trap. Most everyday insulation, such as traditional clothing, blankets, or rolls of fiberglass, is designed primarily to prevent the conduction of heat from one side to the other. A class of insulation invented to help NASA with a range of daunting tasks, from storing liquid hydrogen or helium to insulating spacecraft and keeping astronauts comfortable in their spacesuits, is now keeping beer kegs cold at parties and barbecues around Philadelphia and beyond.
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