Founder Daudi Barnes started the company in 2019 to augment the work of his previous company, Advanced Mobile Propulsion Test.
The Colorado-based startup already operates one test stand, called Sunshine, which AMPT stood up in 2010.
“The market is just really, really expanding really fast right now,” Animas project manager Graham Dudley explained.
So they’ve had four plus years of design and development that they have to reboot on, and that’s really, really expensive and hard for your schedule prediction.
Its a competitive edge in the space propulsion market, which has become increasingly crowded as the cost to launch spacecraft to orbit has dropped.
SpaceX is continuing to make progress on the development of Starship, the largest rocket ever built, with the third test flight Thursday accomplishing considerably more than the previous two tests.
The 400-foot-tall Starship rocket lifted off from SpaceX’s Starbase facility in southeastern Texas at 8:25 a.m. local time.
Although SpaceX has been developing Starship for years, this is only the third time the company has attempted an orbital mission.
The hot-staging technique was performed for the first time, ever, during the second Starship test flight last November.
SpaceX CEO Elon Musk congratulated the team on X, saying, “Starship reached orbital velocity!”Starship reached orbital velocity!
The test version of the rocket is all Blue Origin hardware, but not all of it will necessarily end up going to space.
Tests are anticipated to take at least a week, Blue Origin CEO David Limp said on LinkedIn.
(The BE-4 engines gained flight heritage earlier this year, when they powered United Launch Alliance’s first Vulcan Centaur rocket launch.)
The 320-foot-tall launch vehicle is Blue Origin’s first heavy-lift rocket, designed to launch more than 45 tons of payload to low Earth orbit.
Blue Origin has also scored launches for telecom providers Telecast and Eutelsat for later this decade.
Astra’s new Rocket 4 launch vehicle will be the most powerful in the world, thanks to Ursa Major’s Hadley liquid engine. This engine allows the rocket to reach incredible speeds…
