Vehra: the reusable hypersonic vehicle project.
“The suborbital activity began with the VEHRA (air-launched reusable hypersonic vehicle) project. This constituted an “evolution” of the X-38 experimental lifting body from NASA, for which Dassault Aviation had defined the shape.”
This is following the example of Burt Rutan’s SpaceShipOne and SpaceShipTwo. From a 10t demonstration vehicle the project development will lead then to a 30t ship that will be capable of launching satellites of up to 300kg into orbit. Finally a heavy vehicle with 200t will be able to deliver a 7t payload into low earth orbit.
Excellent news and everything seems to be on track, one more company on the way and doing it alone, without NASA, without ESA.
If you are curious: Another article from Dassault from 2003 outlines the VEHRA project that has the goal of developing a totally reusable space ship that can launch to earth orbit. More details can be found here.
Source: Dassault Aviation
Slow and steady, putting calmly one foot in front of the next, the European Space Agency is coming strong and has mostly celebrated their successes quietly and in a not very spectacular way. The ATV is becoming a foundation for ESA’s own future manned space flight system as well as being the most advanced spacecraft built to date. BBC reports that ESA is developing a plan to send a rover to the moon’s south pole region to look for water ice and to test technology. The concept is called MoonNext and intends to send a rover by 2015. Just like the mars rovers this vehicle would be solar powered and could therefore work in the south polar region where large areas are constantly illuminated by the sun. Of course one other main focus of this mission would be to look for ore and resources in preparation for later manned landings and a moon base down the road. Also finding water ice would be fundamentally important for a manned presence. This rover will obviously also serve as testbed for the planned mars rover within the Aurora exploration program called ExoMars.