WASHINGTON — The area infrastructure firm Sierra House introduced Oct. 3 it has secured backing from the U.S. Air Power Analysis Laboratory (AFRL) to advance its “Ghost” spacecraft, a system designed to ship cargo from area to any location on Earth in below 90 minutes.
Identified for growing area habitats and autos just like the Dream Chaser spaceplane, Sierra House received a contract of undisclosed worth as a part of the AFRL’s Rocket Experimentation for International Agile Logistics (REGAL) program. The Air Power is exploring the potential of area autos to quickly transport crucial provides from orbital warehouses again to Earth. This might embrace reusable reentry autos able to delivering payloads from prepositioned shares in orbit.
Sierra House, based mostly in Louisville, Colorado, stated its protection know-how staff designed the Ghost system to be able to remaining in orbit for as much as 5 years, storing and delivering important provides on-demand. As soon as absolutely developed, the spacecraft might be used for missions reminiscent of delivering rescue kits for downed pilots, medical provides for catastrophe reduction or logistical assist for navy operations.
The corporate earlier this yr reported profitable drop assessments at Florida’s Kennedy House Heart and plans additional testing over the subsequent yr to refine ideas of operations and develop the required infrastructure.
“Sierra House and AFRL need to bridge the hole between present small payload return capabilities to larger tonnage down-mass methods,” the corporate stated in a press release,
Tom Vice, CEO of Sierra House, referred to as the Air Power contract a “important leap ahead” in logistics capabilities for protection purposes. “This partnership permits us to increase the Sierra House Ghost into a bigger kind issue, prepared for crucial protection missions,” he stated.
In accordance with the corporate, every Ghost automobile prices “tens of hundreds of thousands” of {dollars} to construct and the corporate is working to scale back the associated fee to “single-digit hundreds of thousands” per unit.
