NASA and the Private Sector - Page 212

A Washington-state based aerospace company has exited stealth mode by announcing plans to develop one of the holy grails of spaceflight—a single-stage-to-orbit space plane. Radian Aerospace said it is deep into the design of an airplane-like vehicle that could take off from a runway, ignite its rocket engines, spend time in orbit, and then return to Earth and land on a runway.

"We all understand how difficult this is," said Livingston Holder, Radian’s co-founder, chief technology officer, and former head of the Future Space Transportation and X-33 program at Boeing.

On Wednesday, Radian announced that it had recently closed a $27.5 million round of seed funding, led by Fine Structure Ventures. To date, Radian has raised about $32 million and has 18 full-time employees at its Renton, Washington, headquarters.

During an interview with Ars, Holder and Radian CEO Richard Humphrey explained that they realized it would require significantly more funding to build such an ambitious orbital space plane. Funding will pace their development efforts. For that reason, Humphrey said he was not comfortable putting a date on the company's first test flights but said that Radian was aiming to have an operational capability well before the end of the 2020s.

The current design of Radian One calls for taking up to five people and 5,000 pounds of cargo into orbit. The vehicle would have a down-mass capability of about 10,000 pounds and be powered by three liquid-fueled engines. The idea would be to get as close to airline operations as possible, by flying, landing, re-fueling, and flying again.

Since its founding in 2016, Radian has focused on the propulsion and structure of a vehicle that must withstand a variety of thermal and pressure environments. Humphrey said the company has built and tested its first "full-scale" engine. At full power, this cryogenic-fueled engine will have a thrust of about 200,000 pounds.

"We’re still in the leading edges of that work," Humphrey said. "We understand the fundamentals, we can start it, we can stop it, and we're taking a series of small, progressive steps to get to a full capability."

Humphrey, Holder, and the company's other co-founders, Curtis Gifford and Jeff Feige, have a variety of backgrounds at NASA, the US Department of Defense, and various new space companies. They plan to draw upon earlier work by NASA and contractors who have previously attempted to develop a single-stage-to-orbit spacecraft as well as XCOR, which sought to build a suborbital space plane but had to shut down about five years ago due to a lack of funding.

NASA's last serious attempt at building such a space plane came in the late 1990s, with its "Reusable Launch Vehicle Program," which led to the X-33 program. NASA eventually selected a design by Lockheed Martin for the X-33, but this program fizzled out in 2001 as Lockheed and NASA ran into technical problems, and NASA's priorities changed.

Much has changed in the last two decades to make private development of such a vehicle more feasible, Humphrey said. Lightweight aerospace composites were mostly experimental then but are a well-understood technology now. Space launch companies also now regularly "super chill" their liquid propellants to gain more performance during flight, which Radian plans to do.

And perhaps most importantly, in the wake of SpaceX's success with its launch program, there is ever more private capital flowing into spaceflight operations. This means it should be easier for Radian to raise the substantial amounts of money it will need to bring an orbital space plane on line—more than $1 billion, almost certainly—than it would have even five or 10 years ago.

"A long time has passed since the last true attempt at this," Holder said. "The technology has moved forward, and people are willing to fund projects like this."

If Radian can succeed technologically, large markets would likely open. A vehicle like Radian One would be well suited to fly people to commercial space stations in low Earth orbit, which NASA seeks to foster development of by 2030. These planes could also perform Earth observation work and play a role in bringing back space-manufactured goods. There is also the potential for point-to-point travel on Earth.

There can be no question that this is a hugely challenging endeavor that many people have tried before. Will Radian find the right stuff, at the right moment in time? We'd like to think so.

WASHINGTON — The U.S. Air Force awarded SpaceX a $102 million five-year contract to demonstrate technologies and capabilities to transport military cargo and humanitarian aid around the world on a heavy rocket.

The contract is for the rocket cargo program, a new project led by the Air Force Research Laboratory to investigate the utility of using large commercial rockets for Department of Defense global logistics.

Greg Spanjers, rocket cargo program manager, said in a statement to SpaceNews that the contract formalizes a government-industry partnership to help “determine exactly what a rocket can achieve when used for cargo transport, what is the true capacity, speed, and cost of the integrated system.”

The contract, awarded on Jan. 14, was not announced by the Air Force and was first reported by AviationWeek.com.

This is the largest contract awarded to date for rocket cargo. U.S. Transportation Command in 2020 signed cooperative research and development agreements with SpaceX and Exploration Architecture Corporation (XArc) to study concepts for rapid transportation through space. The command last month also signed a CRADA with Blue Origin.

The contract is not specific to any of SpaceX’s launch vehicles. AFRL will have access to SpaceX’s commercial orbital launches and booster landings to collect key data on environments signatures and performance. SpaceX also will provide cargo bay designs that support rapid load and unload and are compatible with U.S. TRANSCOM intermodal containers. The contract also includes an option for a full-up demonstration of heavy cargo transport and landing.

“Commercial vendors envision fixed point-to-point transport to established sites, a commercial service that we are certainly interested in procuring once available,” said Spanjers. He said DoD is “very interested in the ability to deliver the cargo anywhere on Earth to support humanitarian aid and disaster relief.”

Many areas where disasters occur don’t have commercial space ports, however. “We are therefore exploring a wider range of novel trajectories to mitigate overflight issues, exploring a broad range of landing options for austere sites, researching human factors when landing near populations, and a integrating a broader range of cargo including medical supplies,” he said.

SpaceX and the Air Force will explore the use of intermodal containers that are compatible with other transportation delivery modes.

Spanjers said there is no specified timeline for a demonstration at this point. “AFRL will be leveraging several commercial demonstration launches over the next few years to collect the data,” he said. The Air Force “does not drive this schedule but rather will collect data whenever SpaceX flies relevant missions.”

A full-up demonstration of heavy cargo transport capability to another location on Earth could be attempted in a few years but that has yet to be decided.

“Significant heavy cargo from orbit has not been previously attempted,” said Spanjers. “It will fully stress the commercial thermal protection system, landing propulsion, and landing legs.”

The Air Force plans to bring in other companies into the program over time, he said. “We continue to talk to other launch vehicle providers and will consider awarding additional contracts later in the program.”

The producers of Tom Cruise’s planned space movie on Thursday announced plans to attach a studio to the space station in development by Houston-based company Axiom.

U.K.-based studio Space Entertainment Enterprise, co-founded by producers Elena and Dmitry Lesnevsky, contracted Axiom to build the module. Called SEE-1, the module would be “the world’s first content and entertainment studios and multi-purpose arena in space.”

SEE-1 is scheduled to launch in December 2024. It will attach to Axiom’s first module that the company plans to connect to the International Space Station in September 2024.

“Adding a dedicated entertainment venue to Axiom Station’s commercial capabilities in the form of SEE-1 will expand the station’s utility as a platform for a global user base and highlight the range of opportunities the new space economy offers,” Axiom president and CEO Michael Suffredini said in a statement.

On January 20 2022 01:46 ZerOCoolSC2 wrote:
All I see with Radian is the space industry version of Nikola motors. I tried to picture it taking off and landing and...didn't work. Design looks cool.