Hardware Component Prototyping for Operationally Responsive Space Access

Armadillo Aerospace has designed, built and flown a first generation rocket powered vehicle (The QUAD) that has demonstrated the core concepts of - rugged reliability, low cost of design and operation, rapid turn time and insensitivity to weather. This vehicle was flown at the X-Prize Cup 2006 in the NASA Centennial Challenge Lunar Lander competition and was the only vehicle to qualify. We believe that this core concept can be expanded in a modular design to accomplish a wide variety of tasks, up to and including small payload orbital insertion, and still retain all of these desirable features. However, there are numerous design choices to be evaluated in the light of high potential commercial applications that we have been made aware of. This Level I SBIR proposal details the concepts to be evaluated using this successfully demonstrated test bed as the basis for future vehicle designs.