L’azienda spagnola Orbital Paradigm, che aveva a bordo la piccola capsula di rientro sperimentale KID, ha annunciato che quest’ultima è sopravvissuta al rientro del quarto stadio trasmettendo 190 secondi di dati.
Ancora da Orbital Paradigm, il resoconto finale di quanto ha compiuto la capsula KID.
The KID Survived - Final Mission Update
KID was built in 1 year, less than 10 engineers, less than €1M budget. And in the end KID survived the impossible.
This achievement belongs to the team: they put a huge effort and ingenuity in finding effective and viable technical solutions and meeting all the deadlines to reach this result. They did an outstanding job building KID, and what they did worked well. In the last week the team worked on the mission data, analyzing the available information from the KID flight to understand exactly what happened.
Thanks to their deep-dive analysis, we confirmed that we reached 4 out of 5 technological milestones, despite the off-nominal profile. The investigation is still ongoing, but we did relevant progress in confirming that the information we have is very valuable for our future steps.
We flew a sample of our own reusable ceramic thermal protection material destined for our next-gen spacecraft. Data collected confirms it successfully maintained temperatures within the expected range: toasty 300-350ºC outside, 85ºC inside under the thermal protection tile, performing as designed.
KID was supposed to encounter 14g. Initial navigation readings showed 28g recorded. We have now realized that our sensors saturated, maxing out at 30g. By cross-referencing navigation and sensor data with simulations we now estimate KID actually survived an acceleration of probably more than 35g. That is 2.5x our expectations.
KID separated at Mach >20. The capsule maintained a stable flight attitude through the hypersonic phase, all the way down to supersonic/transonic speeds. This matches exactly what we expected for the mission based on the in-house models we used for design.
So, what’s next? Reentry data are comprehensive enough that we do not need to launch a second KID mission. We have what we need. Our focus shifts to the “Learn to Fly” mission next year, which will feature full recovery capabilities. We are raising the bar to achieve controlled reentry flight and recovery operations. Like KID, “Learn to Fly” will host commercial customers. Capacities are already nearly sold out, proving that this is a real market searching for reliable solutions.
This marks the end of the immediate KID post-mission updates. Once the team has concluded their analysis, we will publish a full analysis report, providing visibility to the whole set of data we received.
We flew a sample of our own reusable ceramic thermal protection material destined for our next-gen spacecraft. Data collected confirms it successfully maintained temperatures within the expected range: toasty 300-350ºC outside, 85ºC inside under the thermal protection tile, performing as designed.