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DARPA awards phase 2 space plane contracts

The competition heats up: The second phase contracts in the development of a reusable space plane have been awarded by DARPA.

DARPA has awarded $6.5 million each to three companies for developmental design work, including Boeing (in partnership with Blue Origin), Northrop Grumman (in partnership with Scaled Composites and Virgin Galactic), and Masten Space Science Systems (in partnership with XCOR Aerospace).

The requirements are that the plane fly 10 times in 10 days, reach Mach 10+, put a 3,000 to 5000 pound payload in orbit, and cost less than $5 million per flight. In this new phase, the companies are to deliver finalized designs by 2016, with prototype development to follow.

Genesis cover

On Christmas Eve 1968 three Americans became the first humans to visit another world. What they did to celebrate was unexpected and profound, and will be remembered throughout all human history. Genesis: the Story of Apollo 8, Robert Zimmerman's classic history of humanity's first journey to another world, tells that story, and it is now available as both an ebook and an audiobook, both with a foreword by Valerie Anders and a new introduction by Robert Zimmerman.

 
The ebook is available everywhere for $5.99 (before discount) at amazon, or direct from my ebook publisher, ebookit. If you buy it from ebookit you don't support the big tech companies and the author gets a bigger cut much sooner.


The audiobook is also available at all these vendors, and is also free with a 30-day trial membership to Audible.
 

"Not simply about one mission, [Genesis] is also the history of America's quest for the moon... Zimmerman has done a masterful job of tying disparate events together into a solid account of one of America's greatest human triumphs."--San Antonio Express-News

3 comments

  • David M. Cook

    What about Sierra Nevada Corp and their Dream Chaser? How does the DC fit into this profile?

  • Michael

    Worked on a number of those programs.

    Stated of as a means of finally getting cheap access to space. Then it was down-graded to a demonstration program. Then it morphed into a technology development program. Then everyone took an early lunch.

    Do not have much hope for this.

  • Edward

    It may depend upon how serious DARPA is to have this technology. When their self-driving vehicle competition (Grand Challenge) failed, a decade ago, they held another competition, where they had a winner. Now, people from the winning team are working at Google to develop a commercial self-driving car.

    On the other hand, the Grand Challenge was encouraged by an award to the winner, but this one is a series of contracts, so this could be just another way of “spreading around the wealth.”

    What I find most challenging on this competition is the 10 flights in 10 days. This means that the winner must launch, orbit, release its payload, return to the launch site, and be back on the pad and launching again in 26 hours. Consistently. With no delays.

    So far, the quickest that I have ever heard was SpaceX putting a rocket on a pad and having it ready for launch in a 24-hour period (engines may have been fired for a couple of seconds).

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