A rocket-powered sled?

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Before we start, a quick note. The Aerospace newsletter is going monthly. We’ll be seeing you a bit less often, and we’ll miss you, but we think it’s for the best. Why? We want to bring you only the most important stories of the month in a concise, easy-to-read format.

It’s an exciting time to be interested in space, and we will continue to bring you the best of space news. It will just be a slightly more focused affair, allowing you to quickly read through the highlights of the month.

Now, without further ado, let’s have a look at this week’s stories.

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INDUSTRY UPDATES

🚁 New ‘soft drone’ with flying claws snatches objects mid-air at high speed

🚀 Opinion: A lot is riding on Blue Origin’s New Glenn rocket launch

🔥 ‘Drakaris’: Ukraine’s flamethrower drone torches Russian trenches in fiery attack

💵 Relativity Space has gone from printing money and rockets to doing what, exactly?

🛰️ The Starliner spacecraft has started to emit strange noises

🚀 The New Glenn rocket’s second stage set to roll to the launch pad on Monday

🛰️ SpaceX satellites with Tesat terminals achieve first laser data exchange for U.S. military

🔊 Sierra Space completes acoustics tests of Dream Chaser cargo module

AEROSPACE ENGINEERING SPOTLIGHT

Radian One aims to revive NASA's experimental spaceplane design

A US aerospace startup hopes to bring an old NASA design back to life. 

In the 1990s, the US space agency worked with Boeing on the X-33, also known as the VentureStar. The X-33 was a single-stage reusable spaceplane.

Unfortunately, the development of the X-33 was discontinued around the turn of the millennium due to the immaturity of the composite material technology utilized for the vehicle.

Now, Radian Aerospace claims it is bringing this design back from the dead. The company’s Radian One spaceplane was designed to be the world’s first single-stage-to-orbit, reusable space vehicle operating in low Earth orbit.

Though the Space Shuttle was a reusable spaceplane, it required an external tank and two solid rocket boosters to launch. All of these were expendable parts.

The X-33 would launch vertically like a rocket and land horizontally on a runway. Radian One, meanwhile, would utilize a rocket-powered sled that carries the spaceplane along a two-mile track, reaching speeds of up to Mach 0.7 (537 mph or 864 km/h). The spaceplane would then be released and continue to power itself to orbit using its own engines.

Radian Aerospace says this method would enable it to cut the cost of sending a pound of payload into orbit from $10,000 to $1,000.

One of Radian Aerospace’s co-founders, Livingston Holder, was a project manager at NASA for the X-33 program. He claims composite material research has advanced enough that the company’s version of X-33, Radian One, is now possible.

“We’ve got composite materials that are lighter, tougher, and can take a larger thermal range than we had back then. And propulsion is better than anything we had, in terms of how efficiently it burns propellant and how much the systems weigh,” Holder recently told CNN.

AERO BULLETIN

The importance of New Glenn’s first launch

Blue Origin’s New Glenn rocket could fly to orbit for the first time in October. There is a lot riding on this mission, and it’s not just because it could be the first time Blue Origin reaches orbit. 

Here are a few key factors that make New Glenn’s first launch a milestone moment for the space industry.

Taking on Falcon Heavy

Last week, we wrote about Rocket Lab’s aim to “restore balance” in the medium-lift rocket space with its Neutron launch vehicle. While Neutron will take on SpaceX’s Falcon 9, New Glenn will go up against Falcon Heavy and Starship.

As Rocket Lab’s Sir Peter Beck put it, “no monopoly stands the test of time”. New Glenn will provide new competition for SpaceX, giving NASA more options in the heavy lift category.

Rocket Lab’s ESCAPADE mission

Speaking of NASA, the first New Glenn launch is set to deploy the twin ESCAPADE spacecraft for NASA and Rocket Lab. ESCAPADE aims to study the magnetic fields and climate of Mars.

Blue Origin must launch New Glenn by October 21 to fly within the nearest Mars-Earth alignment window. If it fails to launch within this timeframe, the ESCAPADE spacecraft will have to go into storage until the next window – roughly two years away.

Project Kuiper

Blue Origin has signed a contract with its founder, Jeff Bezos’ delivery giant Amazon, to send Project Kuiper internet satellites into orbit.

When New Glenn foes operational, the private space company will fly 12 of 83 launches for Amazon’s Project Kuiper internet satellite constellation. Project Kuiper is designed to rival SpaceX’s Starlink mega-constellation.