EL SEGUNDO, Calif. — With a government payload aboard, Varda Space Industries launched a rideshare mission with SpaceX, according to a news release.
Varda has an officee in Huntsville.
The mission, Varda’s fifth, launched over the weekend from Vandenberg Space Force Base in Lompoc, California aboard the Transporter-15 rideshare mission with SpaceX.
The vehicle carries a government payload funded through the Prometheus program, a partnership between the Air Force Research Laboratory and commercial space entities, the company said.
“With W-5, AFRL and Varda again demonstrated that hypersonic flight testing can be done routinely and affordably,” said Brandi Sippel, vice president of mission management. “Each Prometheus mission helps expand access to the reentry environment, accelerating the science and engineering that define the future of hypersonic systems.”
Dual-use flights leveraging commercial entities like Varda provide the reentry test community with a novel, low-cost approach to iterative hypersonic science and technology experimentation, the news release said.
Varda said its W-series hypersonic reentry capsule is the lowest cost, most rapid, recoverable option to reproduce the most challenging hypersonic and reentry flight environments. The capsule enters the atmosphere at 18,000 mph and hits Mach 25-plus on every mission before landing by parachute on Earth.
The W-5 vehicle consists of three Varda-made components: the hypersonic reentry capsule; the satellite bus, which provides power, navigation and propulsion in orbit; and an ablative heatshield made of C-PICA.
