Andundil, blue origin to study how to transport the cargo from orbit to the earth for the pentagon

Blue Origin and Andundil have won new study contracts with the US Air Force to explore how their technology, including rockets, could move military goods worldwide.

Air Force rocket cargo program contracts are relatively small – Blue Origin is $ 1.37 million and Andundil at $ 1 million. But they could be the first steps to revolutionize the way the Pentagon carries the cargo. Study contracts like these are also a strong signal as to which players will later compete for larger dollar funding.

Andundil’s contract is particularly intriguing and suggests that the defense startup makes incursions in a whole new business line.

Both prizes are the US Air Force Research Laboratory rocket experimentation program for the Agile Logistics Program (Regal). Blue Origin did not respond to the request for comments from Techcrunch, and an Andundil spokesperson directed Techcrunch to AFRL.

Regal is the branch of experimentation for the larger AFRL rocket cargo program, which focuses on “delivery as a service” via orbital transport. The Air Force wants to obtain these capacities via service -type contracts, similar to the way DOD contracts commercial airlines. The objective of the Regal program is to prove commercial, reusable commercial rockets, back -to -school systems and freight transport systems to allow deliveries to distant theaters or difficult to reach in less than an hour.

Although there is not much public information on the scope of the work or the regal calendar, requests for proposals underlying prices contain interesting information.

Blue Origin’s contract, according to the list of sparse prices, is for an analysis of how its technology could support the “transport of point -to -point materials”. The place of performance listed is icing Merritt, Florida, the house of Blue Origin on the space coast and where it develops the new Glenn rocket with a heavy head.

Andundil’s design study contract, which is also a matter of Regal, has been awarded under a separate call for proposals called “reentry in charge of the development of space and manifestations”.

By cutting the jargon, the proposal implies that Antil will study how to develop a return container which can transport between five tonnes to 10 tonnes of land and back payload. The list, which can be seen on Sam.gov, stressed that the container must operate with different rocks and that the study should offer a thermal protection system. Andundil’s “payload”, as the list calls it, should integrate several useful charges defined by the government and work on platforms.

Back to school is a notoriously difficult problem to solve in SpaceFlight. The development of materials that can survive at the atmospheric back to school and a container that does not completely destroy the content involved is a challenge. A handful of startups, such as Varda Space Industries, have developed back -to -school capsules for space manufacturing, and the SpaceX dragon capsule brings goods and astronauts from the ISS. But overall, the number of suppliers that can provide this capacity is limited.

The news of the two contracts, which has not been reported, follows the Royal Rocket Lab contract which was announced earlier this year. This contract explicitly has a flight demonstration stage, although AFRL has not published other details on this sentence, such as the amount.

If the rocket rocket cargo services, the Pentagon could buy “delivery as a service”, with massive loads leading a heavy commercial rocket and returning to earth inside a capsule for quick unloading. In the long term, AFRL said that the program could even include the point -to -point transport of humans.

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