Seattle-based Radian Aerospace has finished the first round of ground taxi testing for a prototype aircraft that’s meant to blaze the trail for a first-of-its-kind, single-stage-to-orbit space plane.
Radian said the low-speed runway tests were successfully completed this month in Abu Dhabi, with the aim of assessing the subscale prototype’s flight characteristics in preparation for building its full-scale Radian One spaceship.
“These successful tests represent an early but significant step in our broader journey to bring Radian One to market,” Richard Humphrey, co-founder and CEO of Radian, said today in a news release. “While we know there is much work ahead, each step in our robust test program brings us closer to transforming access to space with rapid, reusable and cost-effective transport to low Earth orbit.”
Livingston Holder, Radian’s co-founder and chief technology officer, said the uncrewed PFV01 prototype is a one-12th-scale version of Radian One, measuring roughly 15 feet (4.9 meters) long. “It’s powered by two jet engines,” he told GeekWire. “So, it’s not a rocket-powered system, it’s a jet-engine system.”
During the taxi tests, the prototype performed a series of pitch-up maneuvers and short hops, reaching speeds of around 50 knots (57.5 mph). “We have a lot of data that’s come down, and so we really want to understand what that looks like before we move to the longer runway and start pushing higher speeds,” Holder said.
The design configuration for the prototype tested in Abu Dhabi is known internally as AV09. “We are currently on AV12 in the design team, and we’re progressing to AV13 next week,” Holder said. “That’ll be the start of our next design cycle.” After analyzing all the data from the taxi tests, Radian’s engineers will tweak the prototype’s design for the next round of real-world testing, Holder said.
The full-size Radian One is being designed to accommodate two to five crew members and send 5,000 pounds (2,270 kilograms) or more to low Earth orbit. Radian says the plane could transport crew and cargo to and from the International Space Station or other orbital outposts, or deploy satellite payloads in orbit. The plane could also be used for point-to-point transportation, or for hypersonic flight applications — which are a high priority for the U.S. military.
Radian One would use a rocket-propelled sled as well as its own methane-fueled rocket engines for launch. “We found that there was enough work going on a LOX-methane solution that we didn’t need to do it ourselves,” Holder said. “We could team up with somebody who was further down that road already, and that’s where we’re looking.” He said the integration and testing of Radian One’s propulsion system would be done at the company’s test facility in Bremerton, Wash.
Meanwhile, wind tunnel testing is proceeding at the U.S. Air Force Academy in Colorado, and Radian is continuing to work with NASA’s Glenn Research Center in Ohio on the space plane’s thermal protection system, Holden said. Radian is also developing carbon-composite tanks for the plane, in cooperation with the University of Washington’s Advanced Composites Center and Sedro-Woolley, Wash.-based Janicki Industries.
Radian Aerospace’s most recent funding round raised $27.5 million — which isn’t enough to get the full-size Radian One off the ground. That need for additional capital may help explain why PFV01 was tested on a runway in Abu Dhabi, part of the United Arab Emirates.
“Let’s just put it this way,” Holder said. “The interest in the program is global, and that’s really, really good. The interest in UAE is very high, and I would say that spans from government to private concerns. There’s benefit to being in this space, so people who are interested in maybe being potential users or investors can see some of the work firsthand.”
Holder said “the interest is strong, both from an investment and a user standpoint, and so we’re going to make sure that the folks in the region get exposed to what we’re up to.”
So, what’s the development time frame? Radian Aerospace aims to have Radian One ready in time to provide transport services for the commercial space stations that are currently expected to take a handoff from the International Space Station as early as 2029 or 2030.
Among the orbital outposts on the drawing board are Axiom Station, planned by Houston-based Axiom Space; Orbital Reef, a project led by Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin space venture; and Starlab, which has Voyager Space and Airbus as leading partners.
“I think we’ve probably interacted with almost every commercial space station developer to date,” Holder said. “We built some relationships with them, and I think there’s going to be a lot of coordination before any of those discussions are made public, OK? But the discussions have been energetic and positive, so I think that we could provide a transportation option for them that is quite attractive — and will help them from not just an operational standpoint, but also from a cost management standpoint. Getting crew back and forth less expensively would be very, very valuable to them.”
Could Radian Aerospace really hope to compete with the likes of, say, SpaceX?
“You know, SpaceX is so well-known,” said Holder, who was part of a Boeing team that worked on a single-stage-to-orbit space plane project in the 1990s. “They’ve got lots of flights. They’re doing lots of things. There’s something in the news almost every day from SpaceX, and so we’re not clearly a household name. Yet.”
Holder said he and his teammates are working on that. “With the folks who’ve been helping us and working with us, they seem to know enough about us to be supportive,” he said. “I’ve been pleased with all the interactions we’ve had, in the commercial space, the civil space and the government space. So, it’s been super-good. Super-good.”
https://ift.tt/2JkmKY6 September 25, 2024 at 12:15PM GeekWire
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