Engine Tests Underway for DARPA ‘Phantom Express’ Spaceplane Program

July 9th, 2018

Via: Space News:

A space shuttle-era main engine is undergoing a series of daily test firings to demonstrate its suitability for use on a reusable spaceplane under development.

The Aerojet Rocketdyne AR-22 engine is in the midst of a series of 10 100-second engine firings over the course of 10 days at NASA’s Stennis Space Center in Mississippi. As of July 2 the company has completed six such tests and was on track to complete the rest on schedule.

The engine is a version of the Space Shuttle Main Engine with only minor modifications, said Jeff Haynes, AR-22 program manager at Aerojet, in a July 2 interview. “We’re not designing or building any new hardware for this engine,” he said. “We’re taking and making use of existing hardware, most of it being flight proven.”

One minor difference in the engine, he said, is using a new flight controller, or computer system, from the updated version of the RS-25 engine intended for use on NASA’s Space Launch System. “The rest of it is not new technology,” he said.

The purpose of the test series is to demonstrate that the engine can be used 10 times in 10 days. That is a major requirement of the Defense Advanced Research Project Agency’s Experimental Spaceplane program, for which the AR-22 will power Boeing’s Phantom Express vehicle.

Although the AR-22 and its shuttle-era predecessors have decades of experience, the same engine has never been tested so frequently. Haynes said that there was only one case where the same engine was fired one day apart. “We’ve already far exceeded that in this series,” he said.

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