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Under the guidelines established by the European Space Agency (ESA), a specific effort was devoted to define the preliminary design concepts for a Crew Transport Vehicle (CTV) compatible with the Ariane 5 launcher. The mission objectives of this vehicle include the possibility of transporting 4 people (and a limited amount of pressurized payload) to the International Space Station Alpha (ISSA), and returning them to Earth safely. Different options were identified at system level, however a modular vehicle was commonly adopted: a Crew Module (CM) designed to withstand the typical phases of the atmospheric re-entry and provide an adequate environment for the crew during all the mission a Resource Module (RM) envisaged to provide the propulsion provisions for orbital transfer and deorbiting; in addition it carries all the necessary resources to support the mission from lift-off until separation from the CM.

The aim of this paper is to present the Hermes Thermal Control Concept which constitutes the reference baseline for the phase 2 of the Hermes program. The technical solutions based on active and passive means, are dictated by a variety of requirements including temperature and heat flux limits, mass & power minimization, availability of space for accommodation of TCS devices. Furthermore thecomplex mission profile (including atmospheric flight and several modes of operation o002d;orbit) and the configuration of the space-vehicle, require the adoption of a particularly flexible thermal control. The ATCS (Active Thermal Control Section) is based on a dual loop concept, using both water and Freon R114 cooling loops for heat collection from the various sources, heat transportation and heat rejection through dedicated devices.