The Germany's armed forces have commissioned the Startup Polaris based in Bremen to develop a two-stage, fully reusable hyperschall space aircraft-and only three years to build it up.
The Aurora 28 meter long aircraft will be part of the rocket and part of the aircraft, which lifts and ends up on a runway, but also breaks through the atmosphere and places the payloads up to 1 tons in low earth orbit.
As part of the contract, the startup will design, build and flee the spaceship. The aircraft will serve as a test bed for Hypery flight and defense research. It Could be used as a small satellite carrier if it is equipped with an unusable upper level, said Polaris.
Polaris was founded in 2019 by Alexander Kopp as a spin-off from the German Aerospace Center (DLR). It builds on over three decades of German and European space research.
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The startup has already set up three demonstrators of its Aurora room dance. The first, Mira I., crashed shortly after his opening flight. But the next two iteration mira-II and Mira-III-Hatten better luck. These 5-meter vehicles with a weight of 240 kg have completed over 100 successful test flights since the first start in September last year.
The Mira prototype series is based on jet engines for start, cruise and landing, while an Aerospike rocket engine is included for high-speed tests. The aerospace engines were for the first time in the 1960s at the air pressure changes to all heights, which makes it more efficient than conventional designs.
However, aviation and space travel have never entered the mainstream because they are difficult to cool and difficult to build. Polaris's work of advanced cooling technologies and materials can be associated with the technical challenges in the past.
Polaris wrote history in October last year when it carried out the first flight from an aerospace engine. The AS-1 engine was inflamed for three seconds on board the Mira-II above the Baltic Sea, with a thrust of 900 Newton and the 229 kg vehicle accelerated to 864 km/h.
However, the future big sister Aurora of the Mira will be designed in such a way that you can reach over 6.125 km/h via Mach 5 (over 6,125 km/h) and also hyperschalle velocities.
Spaceships like Aurora could prove to be more cost-effective access to space than rockets, since they can be reused by a conventional runway again and again like an airplane, but with more juice.
The announcement of Polaris comes to Germany's arriving chancellor days Frederick Merz raises doubts as to whether NATO would remain in its “current form” and calls on Europe to increase Defense spending.
