Scaled Composites - AirLaunch LLC win small part of NASA CEV contract

Derek Lyons wrote:
Joe Strout wrote:
This is really cool. It's only $3M, but that's still significant --
only a half-dozen other firms were given equivalent grants. That
indicates that at least some at NASA are receptive to this highly
commercial approach.

It's a contract for a study. Just like hundreds? thousands? that NASA
has entered into over the years covering everything from a three man
orbiting capsule to speculative propulsion concepts like warp drive.
It's utterly unidicative of NASA support for anything.

Move along, nothing to see here.

This was the result of the Concept Exploration and Refinement
Broad Agency Announcement (aka CE&R BAA). As noted, this team
includes Gary Hudson's Airlaunch company as well as Scaled Composites,
and clearly from looking at it uses the HMX (Hudson) Alternate
Access capsule design concept from a few years back
(see http://www.hmx.com/AAS_Briefing_Edited.pdf ).

A very large set of companies and organizations filed
proposals, including Retro Aerospace. The full set of
winners are listed a http://www.spaceref.com/news/viewpr.html?pid=14924

This *is* the entry point into the Office of Exploration Systems
concept definitions. Assuming the budget axe that hit today
is deflected sometime before the beginning of the next fiscal
year, this is the start of the serious work on these projects.


-george william herbert
Retro Aerospace