José Mariano López Urdiales, founder and CEO of the Spanish startup zero2infinity, gave a presentation on Thursday about the company’s Bloostar balloon-launched smallsat rocket during the International Astronautical Conference in Jerusalem.
Mark Schaffer (@mgschaffer), a senior Senior Aerospace Engineer at SpaceWorks Enterprises, provided the following details via Twitter.
- Rocket lifted by balloon to 20 km altitude for launch
- Balloon launched from boat off Canary Islands at 27 degrees latitude
- Payloads: 125kg to 400km @ 27 degrees low Earth orbit, 75kg to 600 km sun synchronous orbit
- 3-stage rocket with all engines using LOX/CH4
- 1st stage has 6 15kN LOX/LCH4 engines. 2nd & 3rd stages use same 2kN LOX/LCH4 engine; 6 engines on 2nd stage, 1 engine on 3rd
- Balloon to be used as communications relay after rocket release
- First test flight of orbital vehicle Q2 2018, first commercial flights after 4th test flight
- Developing upper stage first
- Will offer suborbital flights with 75 kg to 180km by Q4 2016
- Expects $4.0M USD per launch, lower for block buy
- Launch cost will be half price of competitors
- Program has 25 investors from Hong Kong, France, Germany and Spain
- Funding available to reach initial operations
- €198M in letters of intent from customers across 7 countries.