New York-Beijing in one hour. An impossible dream? Not for la start-up chinoise Space Transportation, a well-named structure whose crazy and avowed objective is to launch, from 2025, its winged rocket to attack the future market of suborbital flights for humans in a hurry.
“We are developing a winged rocket for high-speed transport from point A to point B, which will be less expensive than satellite launchers and faster than a traditional aircraft”, explains a spokesperson for the company in an article published by Yicheng Times, taken and translated by Space.com.
An impressive demonstration animation on the company’s website details the concept it is working on, consisting of two fully reusable elements. Its winged rocket is attached to a large structure also equipped with wings and engines, which helps it take off.
Once the suborbital altitude has been reached, the carrier detaches from its launcher to continue its flight at an announced hypersonic speed of more than 4,000 kilometers per hour, and finally land quietly vertically, as a machine designed by SpaceX would do. Its “launch rocket” is also recovered elsewhere in the world.
Around the world
Space Transportation promises ground tests as early as 2023, with a first flight in 2024 and a first manned flight the following year. The promise is crazy and the pace fast, but Space.com notes that the firm did not come out of nowhere and would already have raised nearly $50 million to develop their solution.
In addition, the small structure founded in 2018 has already carried out suborbital flight tests with two spacecraft, named Tianxing-1 and Tianxing-2. It would also like to carry out manned flights, no longer suborbital but orbital – and therefore space – from 2030.
The ambitions are therefore there, but Space Transportation shares them with other more or less large players. SpaceX has in particular already shown its interest in suborbital manned transport from one point to another on the globe, and could be chosen by the American army for transport troops and equipment at very high speed.
With his boss Richard Branson on board and despite some serious regulatory setbacks, Virgin Galactic has also already shown its ability to drive the market for suborbital space tourism and, perhaps in the future, rapid transport of people from one point to another on the globe.
As for the young shoot Radian, it has announced a single-stage orbital launcher which could not only shake the future of space launch, but also that of the transport of goods or people.
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