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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.

In the frame of the HERMES re-orientation activities, a set of studies has been started to define the most suitable scenario for a Man Transportation System (MTS). The possibility to use a non-winged vehicle to cope with different missions and requirements has been widely investigated, in a competitive study lead by Alenia Spazio as System responsible and performed in collaboration with Dassault Aviation. The study has concentrated first on the selection, from a large number of candidate shapes, of 2 promising vehicle concepts, one in the family of blunt bodies and one in the family of slender bodies. Then the design of the two selected shapes and the assessments of their expected performances have been investigated in greater detail in order to consolidate and validate the conclusions of the trade-offs performed during the first part of the study. This paper focuses on the thermal control issues of the two selected vehicle shapes.