Abstract: In the future, high-speed vehicles will develop towards the integration of aviation and aerospace technologies, such as longer range and faster speed, and constantly break through the boundary of flight speed and cruising space. With the continuous increase of flight speed, the thermal load is becoming more and more severe. Meanwhile, the requirements of multi-function integrated design of thermal protection structures and strong constraints on structural quality have put forward new requirements and challenges for thermal protection. In response to these, new features and needs of thermal protection are emerged, and the demand for thermal protection has undergone significant changes. There are obvious gaps in existing technologies, design methods, and recognition of relevant scientific issues, so revolutionary technologies are urgently needed. Therefore, the concept of new thermal barrier was proposed in this paper. It analysed the research status of long time heating, non-ablative heat protection and refined thermal environment prediction, pointed out the specific connotation and important development direction of new thermal barrier, reviewed the new direction and new methods being explored in thermal protection technology, including low ablative/non-ablative technology, system genome material design method, channel-based innovative thermal protection technology, etc. It is believed that solving the new thermal barrier is a scientific and technological problem to break through the limit of existing thermal protection technology, and it is necessary to break through the bottleneck problem of thermal protection of high-speed aircraft with multi-approach combination, multi-method synthesis and multidiscipline crossing. It explores innovative solutions to the problem of new thermal barrier from the aspects of refined thermal environment prediction and control, multi-scale performance prediction of thermal protection materials, new design approach of thermal protection materials, innovative thermal structure, etc. The progress of related research was summarized.