Radian One Shuttle
The Washington-based company Radian Aerospace has announced the beginning of the development of a reusable spacecraft capable of taking off and landing like a conventional aircraft. The project budget is $27.5 million.
This launch scheme has a number of great advantages: the spacecraft is single-stage and reusable, which will significantly reduce the total costs for each flight. After many years of operation of two-stage space shuttles within the framework of the Space Shuttle state program, nowhere in the world has been able to develop a single-stage reusable spacecraft. If the Radian Aerospace project is successful, many technical problems will be solved and — most importantly - flights will become much cheaper. In the near future, the company plans to create a five-seat spaceship called Radian One with a payload capacity of 2.25 tons . It will be launched from a conventional runway in "airplane" mode using three liquid-fuel rocket engines. After gaining the required altitude, additional engines will be launched to launch it into low Earth orbit. It's too early to say whether Radian One will ever fly. However, if the project is successful, there will be every reason to talk about a new era in space exploration.
Alexander Ageev
