The goals of the ICPMSE-7 meeting, as in the past years, are to facilitate exchanges between members of the various engineering disciplines involved in development of space materials, incl. such aspects as environmental hazards of Low Earth Orbit (LEO), Geostationary Earth Orbit (GEO) and Deep Space, ground-based qualification, and in-flight experiments and lessons learned from operational vehicles. The book continues to discuss topics started in the earlier publications and adds new data and results. The proceedings cover a range of inter-disciplinary topics concerning the protection of materials and structures in space and discussing the effects of the aggressive LEO as well as the GEO and Deep Space environments on materials and structures and the ways to predict and reduce these effects of short and long-term space missions.

The effects of various space environment factors like atomic oxygen, vacuum ultraviolet radiation, charging, micrometeoroids, meteoroid showers, etc. on materials and structures in various orbits are discussed. In addition the ways to prevent these effects or reduce them through protection by coatings or modification of affected surfaces are considered in the book. The discussions on development of predictive models of material erosion that will allow the materials engineers and designers of future spacecraft to evaluate materials' behaviour is continued from the past meetings.