By Graham Warwick in Washington DC
Commercial spaceflight company Space Adventures has agreed to acquire Space Launch, a small US company working on technology for aircraft-based launch systems. Having already begun developing a commercial spaceflight venture using a Russian-designed suborbital vehicle, Space Adventures says the acquisition will provide a technology capability that will be used to develop future space tourism vehicles in the USA.
California-based Space Launch has been working on launch systems that use a high-performance aircraft as the first stage, but suffered a setback when the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency terminated work on the Rascal programme to demonstrate the quick-reaction launch of small payloads using a purpose-designed Mach 4 aircraft capable of zoom-climbing out of the atmosphere to deploy an upper stage.
Space Launch completed ground testing of the mass injected pre-compressor cooling (MIPCC) technology used to maintain the thrust of the aircraft’s modified fighter engines to higher speeds and altitude. “MIPCC worked as expected,” says chief executive Jacob Lopata, adding that ground tests validated analytical models for the technology.
Lopata says the two companies “are keeping our plans to ourselves”, but points out that the acquisition of Space Launch gives Space Adventures “a vehicle to investigate and develop technology” for space tourism. “Space Adventures does not develop or own technologies, whereas Space Launch has intellectual property from programmes like Rascal that it can apply to vehicles.”
Early this year, Space Adventures announced a venture with private investment firm Prodea to develop a fleet of commercial suborbital spaceflight vehicles, designed by Myasishchev and developed under the oversight of the Russian Federal Space Agency.
The five-seat, rocket-powered Explorer will be air-launched from a modified Myasishchev M-55 high-altitude aircraft. Space Adventures has announced plans to operate suborbital flights from the United Arab Emirates initially, and also from Singapore and eventually the USA.
Source: Flight International
