The race to perform the first commercial space flight is gathering pace with the successful test of a capsule designed to carry the crew of one competing spacecraft safely back to Earth.
The capsule component of Canadian Arrow underwent a successful drop test, splashing down in Lake Ontario on Saturday. It was dropped from a helicopter hovering 2743 metres above the lake and deployed parachutes to slow its descent.
An artist’s impression shows the crew capsule detaching from its rocket platform (Image: Canadian Arrow)
In a full flight, the capsule will detach from the body of a rocket at an altitude of 80 kilometres, propelling itself to the edge of space. It will then re-enter Earth’s atmosphere before deploying its parachutes and landing in the ocean.
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“Today totally proves our Canadian Arrow design,” said Geoff Sheerin, head of the Canadian Arrow mission. “It went really well and everything worked as it should.”
Launch pad abort
The spacecraft is one of a handful of designs hoping to capture the $10 million Ansari X Prize, for the first non-government spaceflight. To claim the prize, a spacecraft must carry three people to an altitude of 100 km twice within two weeks.
The Canadian Arrow team, based in London, Ontario, says the drop test will be followed by a series of flight tests over the next few months including a launch pad abort.
But the race for the X Prize is intensifying rapidly. One of the frontrunners, Scaled Composites, hopes to make the first of its two X Prize flights on 29 September and the second 4 October. The Scaled Composites entry SpaceCraftOne has already performed a series of successful tests.
And another Canadian entry, Wild Fire recently announced that it hopes to make its first flight on 3 October.
However, others have suffered setbacks recently. Two low-cost entries were destroyed within a day of each other on 7 and 8 August, after test flights went spectacularly wrong.
