NASA launched a novel new heat shield prototype on a successful test flight Monday (July 23), a mission that sent a high-tech space balloon streaking through Earth's atmosphere at hypersonic speeds of up to Mach 10.

The test flight blasted off atop a suborbital rocket at 7:01 a.m. EDT (1101 GMT) from NASA's Wallops Flight Facility on Wallops Island, Va. It sent a small capsule, called the Inflatable Re-entry Vehicle Experiment 3 (IRVE-3) into suborbital space, which deployed the inflatable heat shield and then plunged back down through Earth's atmosphere to splash down in the Atlantic Ocean.

The mission, according to NASA, was an unqualified success and will help shape new re-entry systems for future spacecraft.

"We had a really great flight today," James Reuther, deputy director of NASA's Space Technology Program, told reporters in a news briefing Monday (July 23). "Initial indications are we got good data. Everything performed as well, or better, than expected." [Photos: NASA's Inflatable Heat Shield Ideas for Spaceships]

The IRVE-3 flight was designed to demonstrate how the technology could be used for heat shields during atmospheric entries on future space missions.

The successful test flight is, "a first step for how we explore other worlds," said Steve Jurczyk, deputy director of NASA's Langley Research Center in Hampton, Va.

"As far as the applicability of the technology, [we were] originally motivated to do this to allow us to potentially land more masses at Mars," said Neil Cheatwood, IRVE-3 principal investigator at Langley Research Center. "Mars is a very challenging destination. It has a very thin atmosphere too much of an atmosphere to ignore, but not enough for us to do the things we would at other planets. That was our motivation about nine years ago when we started doing this stuff."

With inflatable heat shields, scientists may be able to land at higher altitudes on Mars, or use the IRVE-3 technology to one day carry larger payloads, including humans, to the surface of the Red Planet, Cheatwood added.

The IRVE-3 heat shield is a cone made up of inflatable rings that are wrapped in layers of high-tech thermal blankets to protect it (and its space capsule) from the searing heat of re-entry through Earth's atmosphere. The 680-pound (308-kg) heat shield prototype was packed inside a 22-inch wide (56-centimeter) nose cone for the test flight. It expanded to a heat shield 10 feet (3 meters) across during the flight.

During the test, which was overseen by NASA's Langley Research Center, the IRVE-3 heat shield launched into space atop a Black Brant 4 rocket and separated from the booster six minutes later, about 280 miles (450 kilometers) above the Atlantic Ocean. IRVE-3 then inflated itself with nitrogen gas as expected, creating a mushroom-shaped heat shield known as an aeroshell.

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NASA launches hypersonic inflatable heat shield