WASHINGTON — A yr after acquiring the assets of Masten Space Systems, Astrobotic has resumed flights of that company’s suborbital vehicle and plans to proceed development of a bigger rocket.
Astrobotic announced Oct. 10 that it accomplished the primary campaign of test flights by Xodiac, a vertical-takeoff, vertical-landing vehicle, since acquiring it and other Masten Space Systems assets last yr. Xodiac conducted 4 flights from Mojave, California, hovering just off the bottom to check plume-surface interactions ahead of future lunar landing missions, supporting research by the University of Central Florida.
Xodiac was built several years ago by Masten Space Systems, based in Mojave, and made greater than 150 low-altitude flights for a wide range of technology demonstration investigations. Nonetheless, the corporate filed for bankruptcy in July 2022 and its assets acquired by Astrobotic that September for $4.5 million.
Xodiac is now a part of Astobotic’s Propulsion and Test Department, which incorporates other assets from Masten Space Systems in addition to a lot of its former employees, who say they’ve picked up where they left off before the bankruptcy.
“We’re just about back to doing Xodiac maintenance, flying it, maintaining it, flying it again,” said Dave Masten, founding father of Masten Space Systems and now chief engineer of Astobotic’s Propulsion and Test Department, in a recent interview.
The flights involved a combination of former Masten Space Systems employees and recent ones. “We went through a really intensive training campaign to get people very comfortable and acquainted with the vehicle, and it really paid off,” said Jenna Edwards, director of propulsion and test at Astrobotic. “It was really exciting to see this team grow up and really take ownership of the vehicle.”
There stays strong interest from various customers, including NASA, in Xodiac. The following campaign of Xodiac flights shall be for NASA’s TechLeap Prize, flying payloads designed to detect hazards from an altitude of 250 meters to support landings at the hours of darkness.
Astrobotic’s manifest of Xodiac customers includes Draper, San Diego State University and Astrobotic itself, using Xodiac to check a hazard avoidance system it has developed for its Griffin lunar lander that can deliver NASA’s VIPER rover.
Sean Bedford, director of business development at Astrobotic, said the corporate has about 20 flights of Xodiac scheduled through the remaining of the calendar yr. “We’re booked up into the third quarter of next yr with just about monthly, if no more frequent, campaigns,” he said. “It’s a testament to the individuality of this platform and what it could possibly provide, in addition to the worth of this form of relevant flight testing for emerging technologies.”
Because it resumes flights of Xodiac, additionally it is continuing work on a bigger suborbital vehicle called Xogdor, development of which had began at Masten Space Systems. Work on Xogdor is supported by a NASA space technology “Tipping Point” award in 2020. Bedford said the corporate is getting near starting hot-fire testing of the methane/liquid oxygen engine that can power the vehicle, with a goal of a primary launch in early 2025.
Xogdor will have the option to fly at higher speeds and transcend the 100-kilometer Kármán line regularly used because the boundary of space. The vehicle can even accommodate larger payloads and might be used for point-to-point suborbital flights, similar to from Mojave to Spaceport America in Recent Mexico.
“We expect there’s quite a lot of quite a lot of potential use cases and users inside NASA, DOD and business industry,” said Bedford. That features potential military interest in Xogdor for “rocket cargo” delivery and as a liquid-fuel goal for missile defense testing. “We actually do think that this could revolutionize suborbital flight testing and suborbital rocketry.”
Dave Masten noted that Xogdor might be used to also fly reduced gravity flights, offering prolonged time at Martian or lunar gravity levels. “Ten minutes of one-sixth or one-quarter gravity is perhaps quite useful to quite a lot of people.”
The combination of the previous Masten Space Systems into Astrobotic has been going well, they said. While the 2 firms once competed against one another for NASA awards, particularly within the Industrial Lunar Payload Services program, Astrobotic had previously been a customer of Masten Space Systems, testing its terrain relative navigation technologies on a Masten vehicle.
“What’s been interesting to me is to see the way in which the portfolio of IP and capabilities that Masten brought overlapped with or had some form of compatibility” with Astrobotic’s work in lunar landers and other technologies, Edwards said. “It’s a very good solution to pull together other departments right into a much larger portfolio of labor.”
“It’s been really good,” Dave Masten said of the combination of his former company into Astrobotic. “It’s been a very positive working experience, and we’re really glad to have that support.”