Posted on 04/17/2007 12:26:51 PM PDT by BenLurkin
MOJAVE - XCOR Aerospace has been awarded a nearly $100,000 contract from the Air Force Research Laboratory to aid in development of a rocket-powered vehicle the service may use as a technology flight test platform. The Small Business Innovative Research contract is worth $99,935 for Phase I, with additional funding in a Phase II contract possible in nine months or so.
The contract award reflects the Air Force Research Laboratory's interest in reaching out to the emerging entrepreneurial space industry, said Jeff Ponable , a project manager in the laboratory's Air Vehicle Directorate.
The service is seeking a flight test platform that may be used to test various technologies, Ponable said. These may include such areas as aerodynamic configuration of control surfaces, and adaptive guidance, navigation and control systems that may be used to recalculate a vehicle's trajectory in real-time during flight.
The contract is for "a small, innovative company, eager to go build and fly a vehicle," he said.
A second such contract was also awarded to Texas-based Armadillo Aerospace, a competitor in the Ansari X Prize and X Prize Cup.
Mojave-based XCOR has made a name for itself in developing safe, reusable, reliable rocket engines. Among its existing contracts is a rocket engine design for NASA's next manned lunar spacecraft.
The air vehicle in design under this Air Force contract will be capable of altitudes of 200,000 feet and supersonic speeds. The simple, rocket-powered aircraft will fly low suborbital demonstration missions, according to the company.
Like their earlier rocket-powered aircraft, the EZ-Rocket, this vehicle will be an operations demonstrator, said Aleta Jackson, manager at XCOR.
It will be used to show it is possible to operate such a vehicle regularly, with multiple flights per day of the reusable craft utilizing a small ground crew.
(Excerpt) Read more at avpress.com ...
Space Ping.
I don’t know why this is news. There are hundreds of SBIR’s and STTR’s awarded quarterly for all kinds of technology advancement.
I guess it is really more chat than “news”.
Can a Small Start-up Build America's Next Spaceship?They proposed a radical idea to NASA: Use contracts that NASA was offering for mere paper studies on next-generation spaceships to instead build actual, working hardware. In Gump's plan, incremental progress toward a fully functional vehicle would be rewarded with additional funding, allowing the project to move forward... 'What we're proposing to NASA,' Gump said, 'is a type of incremental side bet' to the big aerospace effort to build America's next spaceshipóthat is, a scaled-down backup and supplement to the CEV. "Every 6 to 12 months we have performed a set of hardware milestones, and NASA has had a chance to say, ëWell, have you actually performed what you promised?' So they never are betting the entire amount of money."
Popular Science
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