New Frontier Aerospace Bridges Hypersonic Past And Future

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

Thirty years after the first flight of a pioneering reusable rocket ship known as the Delta Clipper Experimental, or DC-X, a commercial venture is aiming to bring its legacy to life in the Seattle area. Even its name - New Frontier Aerospace - is a callback to the earlier days of America's space effort, going back to John F. Kennedy references to outer space as part of his New Frontier."

We're sort of like the grandson of DC-X," New Frontier's co-founder and CEO, Bill Burners" Bruner, said at the startup's headquarters in Tukwila.

But he doesn't see New Frontier as a space launch venture in the strictest sense of the word. We're not doing the squat, or cylindrical or conical shapes that we were talking about in those days," he told GeekWire. We're proposing to combine the hypersonic research of the '50s, '60s and '70s, and some of those geometries, with reusable rockets to attack the trillion-dollar air transportation market instead of the $11 billion space launch market."

[...] The startup is one of several companies whose prospects are on the rise partly because of the U.S. military's interest in hypersonic aerial vehicles that travel at more than five times the speed of sound. Like Stratolaunch - a company founded by the late Seattle billionaire Paul Allen more than a decade ago - New Frontier aims to help the Pentagon counter hypersonic threats from Russia and China.

Bruner said New Frontier is taking a step-by-step approach, starting with the Pathfinder, a hypersonic vehicle that could be used for weapons testing or suborbital point-to-point cargo transport. The company has been awarded $2.25 million to develop the craft's 3D-printed Mjolnir rocket engine, which is named after the hammer wielded by Thor in Norse mythology (and in Marvel movies). In June, New Frontier received an additional $150,000 from NASA for Mjolnir development.

Read more of this story at SoylentNews.