ELON Musk’s SpaceX has just sealed a deal with the United States Air Force to rocket military cargo around the world.
SpaceX won a $102 million Air Force contract on Friday to develop technologies for delivering military supplies and humanitarian aid via rockets.
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The contract, which is the largest ever awarded for rocket cargo, is for five years and was granted by the US Department of Defense (DoD).
The DoD recently launched a new project called the ‘rocket cargo program,’ which aims to investigate the utility of using large commercial rockets for point-to-point cargo transit.
“The DoD is very interested in the ability to deliver the cargo anywhere on Earth to support humanitarian aid and disaster relief,” Program manager Greg Spanjers told SpaceNews earlier this week.
Spanjers noted that because many disaster-laden areas don’t have commercial spaceports, the AFRL is hoping to explore “a wider range of novel trajectories to mitigate overflight issues” and a “broad range of landing options for austere sites.”
“Researching human factors when landing near populations and integrating a broader range of cargo including medical supplies,” are also areas of focus.
The contract does not detail exactly which SpaceX rocket the project is calling for, however, in previous military missions Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy have been used.
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Still, Musk has made it clear that SpaceX’s Starship rocket is the vehicle of the future as the company has spent the last two years preparing for test launches.
The Air Force Research Lab (AFRL) will have at its disposal SpaceX’s commercial orbital launches and booster landings to analyze each of their performance.
SpaceX is also going to offer AFRL cargo bay designs that support rapid load and unload mechanisms and are compatible with U.S. TRANSCOM intermodal containers.
There is no specific timeline as of right now, but the initiative is planning to launch demonstration flights over the next few years for data-collecting purposes.
Spanjers noted that the Air Force “does not drive this schedule but rather will collect data whenever SpaceX flies relevant missions.”
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