Blue Origin and Anduril have won a new research contract with the US Air Force to explore how technologies, including rockets, can move military cargo around the world.
There are relatively few contracts under the Air Force’s rocket cargo program. Blue Origin costs $1.37 million and Andrill costs $1 million. But they could be the first step in revolutionizing the way pentagons transport cargo. Such research contracts are also a strong signal for players to compete for large funding later on.
Anduril’s contract is particularly interesting, suggesting that defense startups are entering an entirely new line of business.
The two awards fall into US Air Force Research Institute rocket experiments for the Global Agile Logistics (Regal) program. Blue Origin did not respond to TechCrunch’s request for comment, so Anduril spokesperson pointed TechCrunch to AFRL.
Regal is the experimental division of AFRL’s large-scale rocket cargo program, focusing on “delivery as a service” via orbital transport. The Air Force wants to procure these features through service-type contracts, similar to how DOD contracts commercial airlines. The purpose of the imposing program is to prove commercial, reusable rockets, re-entry and freight transport systems, allowing delivery to remote or difficult-to-reach theaters within an hour.
There is not much public information about Regal’s work or the scope of the timeline, but the proposal request underlying the award contains some interesting information.
According to the list of the Sparse Awards, the Blue Origin contract is intended to analyze how the technology can support “point-to-point material transport.” The performance location listed is Blue Origin’s home on Space Coast, Merritt Island, Florida, and is the development of a new heavy lift Glen Rocket.
Andrill’s design research contract, although proud, was awarded under another call for a proposal called “payload re-enter from space development and demonstrations.”
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The proposal to get through the jargon means that Andrill will study how to develop a re-entry vessel that can carry 5 to 10 tonnes of payload from Earth. The list, which can be seen on sam.gov, emphasized that containers should work with different rocks and that the research should propose a thermal protection system. Anduril’s “payload containers” must consolidate multiple government-defined payloads and work across platforms, as the list calls.
Re-entry is a difficult problem that is notoriously difficult to solve in spaceflight. The development of materials that can withstand reentering the atmosphere and containers that do not completely destroy the related content are challenges. A few startups like Varda Space Industries have developed re-entry capsules for space manufacturing, and SpaceX’s Dragon capsules take back cargo and astronauts from the ISS. Overall, however, there are only a limited number of vendors that can provide this feature.
News of the two unreported deals follow Rocket Lab’s own imposing deal, announced earlier this year. That agreement explicitly has flight demonstration steps, but AFRL has not released any other details of that award, like the amount.
If rocket cargo service matures, the Pentagon can purchase “delivery as a service” and can quickly offload back to Earth within the capsule, with a massive load on a commercial heavy rocket. In the long run, AFRL said the program could even include point-to-point human transport.
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