Washington State-based aerospace company Radian Aerospace has emerged from a long radio silence by announcing plans to develop a project long revered as one of the holy grails of spaceflight, the single-stage spaceplane. Radian Aerospace said it is designing an aircraft-like craft that can take off from a runway, fire rocket engines, fly into orbit, and then return to Earth and land on the runway.
“We are very aware of how difficult this is,” said Livingston Holder, co-founder of Radian, chief technology officer and former head of Future Space Transportation and X-33 programs at Boeing.
On Wednesday, Radian announced that it recently raised $27.5 million in seed capital. Most of the money came from Fine Structure Ventures. To date, Radian has raised approximately $32 million in investments and has 18 full-time employees at its headquarters in Renton, Washington.
Holder and Radian CEO Richard Humphrey said significantly more funds would be needed to build an orbital spaceplane. For this reason, Humphrey clarified that he could not yet give a date for the first test flights of the device, but said that Radian will aim to have all the necessary operational capacity well before the end of the 2020s.
The current design of the Radian One is to carry up to five people and 5,000 pounds of cargo into orbit. The vehicle, powered by three liquid fuel engines, will have a payload capacity of approximately 10,000 pounds. The idea was to get as close as possible to the functionality of a conventional aircraft, that is, to fly in, land, refuel and take off again.
Since its founding in 2016, Radian has focused on powertrain and vehicle design to withstand extreme temperatures and pressures. Humphrey said the company had already built and tested its first "full scale" engine. At full power, this engine will have about 200,000 pounds of thrust.
“We are still at the very beginning of our work,” Humphrey said. “We already understand the basics, we can start or we can stop, and now we are taking a series of small incremental steps to bring the work to full capacity.”
Humphrey, Holder and co-founders Curtis.jpgford and Jeff Feige have extensive experience at NASA, the US Department of Defense and some new space companies. They plan to use early developments from NASA and its contractors, who were already trying to build a single-stage spacecraft. They also use the developments to create a suborbital space plane of the private company XCOR, whose project was closed about five years ago due to lack of funding.
NASA's last serious attempt to build a space plane was in the late 1990s, under the X-33 program. In the end, NASA chose the Lockheed Martin project for the X-33, but in 2001 the program was considered futile, as Lockheed and NASA faced serious technical problems, and NASA's priorities had already changed.
A lot has changed in the last two decades, Humphrey says, and private development of a space plane looks more feasible. Lightweight aerospace composites were then mostly experimental, but are now a well-studied technology. Space launch companies are now regularly "cooling" liquid propellant to improve performance during flight. It's also planning to use Radian.
And most importantly, after the success of the SpaceX program, more and more private capital is pouring into space flights. This means that it will be easier for Radian to raise the significant amounts of money it will take to launch an orbital space plane - and that's more than $1 billion for sure - than it would have been 5 or 10 years ago.
"It's been a long time since the last real attempt to do this," Holder said. "Technology has advanced and people are willing to fund projects like this."
If Radian can succeed in its endeavors, it will be a new milestone in the history of transport. A vehicle like the Radian One would be well-suited for carrying humans to low-Earth orbit commercial space stations, which NASA aims to stimulate by 2030. These aircraft can also perform earth observation work and play an important role in the transport of goods, including those made in space.
There can be no doubt that this is an extremely difficult task, which many have tried before. Will Radian be able to find the right development vector at the right time? We sincerely wish them success.
bbabo.Net