ICARUS is a project funded by the European Union’s HORIZON EUROPE program, under the grant agreement #101134997.The project targets to bring up to TRL-6 the maturation of enabling technologies of the Inflatable Heat Shields (IHS), an innovative re-entry solution for re-usable space transportation systems, deemed applicable for recovery of Launch Vehicles stages.This paper will present the project overview and set-up, the engineering work executed so far, and the effort planned to be carried out up to completion. A thorough insight will also be included on the system design of the Aerodemonstrator solution with a particular focus on: aeroshape definition and characterization, configuration and layout development, thermal and mechanical design assessment, key sub-system conceptual design and sizing, and system synthesis.