Third Day Of Attempts Yields Apparent Success
Talk about taking it down tot he wire! Masten Space Systems
has successfully qualified for first place in Level Two of the
Northrop Grumman Lunar Lander Challenge Wednesday. Flying a brand
new vehicle named XA-0.1E (nicknamed Xoie).
“To come from not flying at all last year to qualifying
for level one AND level two of the LLC this year shows how far our
technology has progressed,” Masten Space Systems CEO David
Masten said. “After a short vacation we will start modifying
Xoie for commercial payloads and begin work on Xoie’s
successor.”
Xoie is a larger, lightweight version of Masten’s Level
One vehicle Xombie and features an aluminum structure, larger tanks
and a more powerful engine. Originally designed for only 750 pounds
of thrust, Xoie’s engine produces over 1000 pounds of thrust.
“Our engines go to 11! Now we go build the 2500 pound
version,” stated MSS propulsion engineer Jonathan Goff. A
visibly exhausted but happy Ian Garcia, guidance engineer, said,
“We wrote our flight control system from scratch and it just
does what I tell it to do! Making it work for supersonic flight is
going to be a fun challenge.”
Masten’s qualification flight came at the final Lunar
Lander Challenge flight window on Friday morning. During previous
windows on Wednesday and Thursday the vehicle experienced
communications and plumbing issues. After a small fire on Thursday
afternoon the team spent most of the night engineering a solution
to a small leak. The solution worked and the team successfully flew
the required profile on Friday morning.
“We are now working with interested parties to begin
payload integration for low altitude commercial flights in early
2010,” said Michael Mealling, Vice President of Business
Development.
“If you want to book space on our early commercial flights
the time to do that is now. We’re seeing significant interest
from research scientists, companies looking to increase their
Technology Readiness Levels, and aerospace systems companies
building unique quality assurance techniques.”
Recently, the Department of Defense awarded Masten Space Systems
a Small Business Innovation and Research (SBIR) contract to use its
vehicles as a network communications testbed.
“We are building up a good head of steam. Next year is
going to be full of bigger, faster, and higher,” said Masten.
“Winning contests is fun, but we won’t rest until
we’re flying a fleet of vehicles into space carrying all
sorts of commercial payloads.”