NASA personnel are discussing a concept called an External Payload Carrier (XPC) which is a pod that can be carried on an Atlas on any flight that has excess performance, to provide a capability of several thousand pounds of suborbital payload that can either be ejected or carried throughout the first-stage trajectory. This is the first conference where this concept has been discussed openly, with information provided to researchers. It mimics an Atlas SRB.
6 thoughts on “Heavy-Lift Suborbital”
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I saw mention of the idea about a year ago. The idea is and interesting one. It would give you a really huge suborbital flight, but it probably wouldn’t be cheap, and ride opportunities would be spotty. With work you might even make it recoverable…it’ll be interesting to see how this does relative to higher-flight-rate but smaller reusables suborbital vehicles.
~Jon
Hadn’t heard of this. My first thought is that, without a dedicated flight, the trajectory wouldn’t be optimal for much zero-g.
Everything old is new again.
This sounds very much like the Suborbital Payload Pods they used to fly on the early Atlas’ back in the day.
Best of luck to them.
Ok, reading Clark Lindsey’s comments, this appears to give you around 10 minutes of microgravity. I assume the cost would be pretty low per pound too. It sounds like it is effectively icing on the cake since a number of flights will need to send up ballast weight anyway. If it works, it provides an additional sliver of revenue opportunity that wouldn’t otherwise be there.
Was it designed for land or water recovery – given that the standard Atlas launch is always over water…
At UAH in the early 90’s flew a microgravity mission using the SRB from the Delta II program (Castor 9)
It cost $3million bucks. Orbital Sciences screwed it up and it ended up as a ballistically implanted reef.