Nasa funds rocket flights

2010-08-31 13:34

Los Angeles - Experimental unmanned rockets being developed by California and Texas firms will make tests flights to the edge of space this year under a Nasa funding plan announced on Monday.

Masten Space Systems of Mojave, California, and Armadillo Aerospace of Rockwall, Texas, were awarded a total of $475 000 by Nasa's Commercial Reusable Suborbital Research Programme, the space agency said.

The two companies are among an elite group of private spaceflight entrepreneurs that are not as well-known as the marquee programmes being developed for Sir Richard Branson's Virgin Galactic space tourism company at Mojave, and SpaceX, the Hawthorne, California, company seeking to become Nasa's choice for space station supply missions.

Nasa wants the flights to demonstrate capabilities of the Masten and Armadillo vehicles to carry small payloads to what it terms "near-space" - altitudes between 20 000 metres and 106 000 metres.

The programme seeks dependable rocket systems that can fly at reasonable cost while safely returning payloads to the ground. Masten's president and chief executive officer, David Masten, said he hopes the contract is a bellwether of a long association with Nasa.

Full throttle

"This means we've got a nice wonderful start," he said.

Masten will use a modified version of a vertical-takeoff-and-landing rocket it used last year to win a $1m contest as it attempts to simulate a lunar landing by taking off from a pad, flying horizontally to land on another pad then taking off again to return to the starting point.

Masten's craft will make two flights late this year and two early next year from Mojave Air & Spaceport in the high desert north of Los Angeles. Two are planned to reach altitudes about 5km high and two will go to about 29km high, Nasa said.

The latter flights will lift off slowly and then go to full throttle, Masten said.

"We'll go up to one-third of the way up, shut off the engine and coast the rest of the way up," he said.

As it starts coming back down, drag flaps will be deployed to keep the rocket oriented properly and to steer it back over the landing pad. The rocket will then re-ignite to slow it down for landing, he said.

Armadillo, which could not be immediately reached for comment, is a decade-old, seven-employee company formed by John Carmack, co-founder of id Software and lead programmer of such games as Doom and Quake.

Microgravity

Nasa said Armadillo has been funded for two flights to altitudes of about 14km and a later flight about 40km high.

Such systems would be useful for researchers such as those who need to conduct experiments in microgravity conditions.

Masten said the capability he's offering is about three or four minutes of microgravity at a time compared to 20 or 30 seconds during so-called zero-gravity flights by jet aircraft such as Nasa's old "vomit comet". The cost also sufficiently low that more scientists could get more time in, he said.

- AP

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