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Into the Future
The Advanced Space Transportation Program supports long-range, basic research to develop advanced space transportation technologies. The program consists of airframe, propulsion and long-term space transportation research.One of the new technologies under development is a rocket engine that consumes oxygen in the air and stored liquid oxygen when it leaves the atmosphere. Called a Rocket based combined cycle (RBCC), it offers safety, reliability, and cost advantages by making vehicles smaller and more efficient.
Harnessing the Sun’s energy through Solar Thermal Propulsion will propel vehicles through space by significantly reducing weight, complexity and cost while boosting performance over current conventional upper stages. Another solar powered system, Solar Electric Propulsion, demonstrates ion propulsion is suitable for long duration missions. There are many other high risk technologies such as pulse detonation engines, high-energy propellants, and advanced propulsion concepts and materials.
Once technologies are developed in ASTP, then they may be validated, as required, by flight experiments in the Future-X Program.
The ASTP Program is also investigating the use of magnetic levitating sleds, rockets that ride on laser beams, and many other advanced technologies that can be applied to space travel. ASTP provides the technological building blocks for earth-to-orbit and in-space systems by reducing weight, complexity, and cost while boosting performance over conventional systems. Technologies pursued by the ASTP Program are applicable to systems for the next ten to forty years.
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