Radian Aerospace has moved one step closer to achieving the “holy grail” of spaceflight: a reusable space plane that can take-off from an airfield

Radian Aerospace completes ground tests of prototype space plane

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2024-09-25 14:30:02

Radian Aerospace has moved one step closer to achieving the “holy grail” of spaceflight: a reusable space plane that can take-off from an airfield and land on a runway like a conventional airplane. The startup just announced completion of a series of ground tests in Abu Dhabi earlier this summer.

The tests were completed with a sub-scale prototype flight vehicle that the company is calling PFV01. The main purpose of the testing was to generate data on how the vehicle would fly and handle, and to compare this data to simulations the company’s been doing over the last several years. While the vehicle did not fly, it did perform a series of small hops on the runway, executives told TechCrunch in a recent interview.

PFV01 is much smaller than the final vehicle at around 15 feet long, but the data still helps inform key pieces of the final design and flight control systems, like where the landing gear should be located, or where the center of gravity should be to maximize stability midair, cofounder CTO Livingston Holder explained.

“This vehicle gives us the ability to adjust the center of gravity forward and aft, up and down, it gives us the ability to adjust the location of the landing gear. Those adjustments give us real world feedback into what our analytical data says,” he said. “Wherever there’s ambiguity… that’s one of the things that the PFV really gives us the opportunity to do, is drive uncertainty down so that we have better fidelity with our analytical processes as we go faster with the vehicle and do more flights.”