🚀 The first edition of Aerospace is ready for take off!

Welcome to Aerospace by Interesting Engineering, your gateway to the cutting-edge innovations and breakthroughs fueling space exploration and shaping our future on Earth.

2023 was a bumper year for the aerospace industry, with India landing at the lunar south pole on a tiny budget and SpaceX’s fully-integrated Starship launch system climbing into the skies for the first time.

The new year has already kicked off with a bang, with Falcon 9 flying several satellites to low Earth orbit only four days into 2024, and United Launch Alliance (ULA) performing final preparations for the first flight of its Vulcan Centaur rocket.

NASA also set out an ambitious long-term plan by announcing a new long-range Mars aircraft concept that would build on the innovations of its Ingenuity helicopter. A bold start to the year in which NASA aims to finally send humans back to the Moon.

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INDUSTRY UPDATES

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AEROSPACE ENGINEERING SPOTLIGHT

NASA is incorporating the lessons learned from its Ingenuity Mars helicopter – the first chopper to fly on another planet – into its future plans for Mars exploration. Now that the US space agency has successfully flown a helicopter on the Red Planet, showing it’s capable of using rotor blades for propulsion in the planet’s incredibly thin atmosphere, it is taking the next bold step in the form of MAGGIE.

MAGGIE, or the Mars Aerial and Ground Intelligent Explorer, is a concept for a massive solar-powered VTOL propeller aircraft with a range of roughly 111 miles (179 km) at an altitude of 3,280 feet (1,000 m) on a full battery.

This would be a substantial upgrade over Ingenuity, which has kept within a roughly 10-mile range of the Perseverance rover and has reached a maximum altitude of 79 feet. However, all of this will largely be possible thanks to the groundbreaking work of the Ingenuity team.

In a January 4 blog post, NASA explained that “the attractiveness of airborne missions on Mars has been amply demonstrated by the Ingenuity helicopter.” The space agency added that MAGGIE will be able to capture a wide range of images of the Red Planet, leading to high public engagement with the mission. As with many aerospace technologies, the benefits would also be felt on Earth where VTOL technologies would be boosted by the advancements developed by the MAGGIE team.

Getting into the technical side of things, MAGGIE will use advanced deflected slipstream technology with CoFlow Jet (CFJ), an active flow control method first proposed in 2004. The aircraft’s cruise Mach number will be 0.25. It will also have a cruise lift coefficient CL of 3.5, which NASA said is roughly an order of magnitude higher than conventional subsonic aircraft. This will, of course, be necessary for the VTOL aircraft to fly in the low-density Martian atmosphere.

Impressively, NASA believes MAGGIE could travel 16,048 kilometers over the course of a Martian year, which lasts 687 days.

NASA announced MAGGIE under the NASA Innovative Advanced Concepts (NIAC) program. According to the space agency, it is still in the early concept phase. A conceptual MAGGIE system study showed that the concept “appears to be feasible, but needs to be further investigated, designed, and verified under Martian atmospheric conditions in Phase I.”

If the MAGGIE system is eventually deployed on Mars, it will vastly alter humanity’s capability for planetary exploration and will likely lead to numerous missions exploring other parts of the Solar System. And it’s all thanks to the work carried out on the relatively small, but historic and groundbreaking Ingenuity helicopter.

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LAUNCHES TO LOOK OUT FOR IN 2024

2024 promises to be another impressive year for the space industry. Here are some of the biggest upcoming space missions and rocket launches of the year. For more, click here.

NASA’s crewed Artemis II Moon mission. NASA launched its Artemis I missions aboard its Space Launch System (SLS) at the tail end of 2022. Now, the space agency is preparing to fly Artemis II by the end of the year. The mission will see astronauts finally return to the Moon for the first time since Apollo 17 in 1972.

The crew – NASA's Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, Christina Hammock Koch, and the Canadian Space Agency's Jeremy Hansen – will launch atop SLS before flying around the Moon and back in an Orion capsule. Artemis III will then land a crew on the lunar surface in 2025 or 2026.

Starship to fly again. SpaceX’s enormous Starship rocket failed to reach orbit on its first two attempts in 2023. That’s not to say it wasn’t a successful year for the Starship program, which greatly benefited from the wealth of data collected during those two flight tests.

Starship’s third flight test (OFT-3) is just around the corner, and the massive rocket will have a better chance than ever of reaching orbit. SpaceX recently performed a static fire engine test on the next Starship upper stage prototype, Ship 28, meaning it won’t be long before we see Starship fly again.

Astronauts could fly from Indian soil for the first time. After the great success of the Chandrayaan-3 lunar landing in 2023, the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) has its sights set on sending astronauts to orbit for the first time from Indian soil.

India’s Gaganyaan astronaut program aims to validate human spaceflight technologies via a test flight this year. If all goes according to plan, ISRO could send the first crewed Gaganyaan mission to space by the end of 2024.

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