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DARPA Gives Additional Spaceplane Development Funds to Boeing, Northrop, Masten

DARPA Gives Additional Spaceplane Development Funds to Boeing, Northrop, Masten - top government contractors - best government contracting event
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DARPAXS1The U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency has awarded Boeing, Northrop Grumman and Masten Space Systems around $19.5 million in contract funds to continue building prototype robotic spaceplanes, Space.com reported Friday.

Mike Wall writes the three companies moved into phase 1B of the agency’s Experimental Spaceplane-1 development initiative.

Boeing and Northrop received $4 million each and Masten secured $3 million from DARPA during summer 2014 under the XS-1 design phase, according to Space.com.

The program’s goal is to build a reusable unmanned launch vehicle that would fly up to 10 times in 10 days and carry as much as 5,000 pounds of payload into space for not more than $5 million per mission.

Boeing partnered with Blue Origin, Northrop with Virgin Galactic and Masten Space Systems with XCOR Aerospace for the XS-1 project.

DARPA aims to launch the XS-1 spaceplane’s initial orbital mission as early as 2018.

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Written by Mary-Louise Hoffman

is a writer of news summaries about executive-level business activity in the government contracting sector. Her reports for ExecutiveBiz are focused on trends and events that drive the GovCon industry to include commercial technologies that private companies are developing for federal government use. She contributes news content to ExecutiveBiz’s sister sites GovCon Wire and ExecutiveGov.

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