For us (Armadillo Aerospace) it leads to technologies that we need to build the next bigger vehicles and their systems. Our plans are definitely moving that direction and we have some interesting ways of using
COTS, at least off-the-shelf for us, parts to build much larger systems and eventually even orbital vehicles. We're suprisingly not that far away from that much bigger next step.
It takes a serious amount of work, even though this prize looks taylor made for us, it's still not easy. Developing engines that can run for that long is a major PITA, the vehicle is fairly easy, we've got one already that can win the shorter duration prize. Navigation isn't hard with GPS, but landing in rough terrain - practice...? That's another major issue, testing involves actually running the vehicle that long and then finally running flights that duplicate the expected prize flights and those require special consideration with FAA/AST. This is the major issue for anyone wanting to do this, you just cannot go out to a field and run one of these things like that, it requires a license/permit and you have to do a significant amount of work to just get that.
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For us (Armadillo Aerospace) it leads to technologies that we need to build the next bigger vehicles and their systems. Our plans are definitely moving that direction and we have some interesting ways of using COTS, at least off-the-shelf for us, parts to build much larger systems and eventually even orbital vehicles. We're suprisingly not that far away from that much bigger next step.
It takes a serious amount of work, even though this prize looks taylor made for us, it's still not easy. Developing engines that can run for that long is a major PITA, the vehicle is fairly easy, we've got one already that can win the shorter duration prize. Navigation isn't hard with GPS, but landing in rough terrain - practice...? That's another major issue, testing involves actually running the vehicle that long and then finally running flights that duplicate the expected prize flights and those require special consideration with FAA/AST. This is the major issue for anyone wanting to do this, you just cannot go out to a field and run one of these things like that, it requires a license/permit and you have to do a significant amount of work to just get that.