NASA awarded contracts to three teams —
Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, The Boeing Company (and one more Scale Composite Bert Rutan) — to study advanced concept designs for aircraft that could take to the skies in the year 2025 and has announced their initial designs.
Scaled Composites, LLC is an aerospace and specialty composites development company located in Mojave, California (about 80 miles north of Los Angeles). This is the one that is not talked about…
FOUNDED IN 1982 BY BURT RUTAN, SCALED HAS BROAD EXPERIENCE IN AIR VEHICLE DESIGN, TOOLING AND MANUFACTURING, SPECIALTY COMPOSITE STRUCTURE DESIGN, ANALYSIS AND FABRICATION, AND DEVELOPMENTAL FLIGHT TESTS OF AIR AND SPACE VEHICLES.
The employees at Scaled come from a diverse background of talents, experience, and interests. This unique combination of individuals helps promote an innovative and creative atmosphere. Scaled offers the opportunity to pursue career and personal interests in a manner that can be found nowhere else by following one simple rule: have fun.
Each design looks very different, but all final designs have to meet NASA’s goals for less noise, cleaner exhaust and lower fuel consumption. Each aircraft has to be able to do all of those things at the same time, which requires a complex dance of tradeoffs between all of the new advanced technologies that will be on these vehicles.
The proposed aircraft will also have to operate safely in a more modernized air traffic management system. And each design has to fly up to 85 percent of the speed of sound; cover a range of approximately 7,000 miles; and carry between 50,000 and 100,000 pounds of payload, either passengers or cargo.
Company (NASA/The Boeing Company)
Boeing’s CST-100 capsule design can carry a crew of seven and is designed to support the International Space Station and the Bigelow Aerospace Orbital Space Complex. (Boeing)
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