Germany’s armed forces have awarded a contract to Bremen-based startup Polaris to develop a two-stage, fully reusable hypersonic spaceplane. Dubbed Aurora, the 28-metre-long aircraft will be capable of taking off and landing on a runway, as well as blasting through the atmosphere to place payloads up to 1-ton in low-Earth orbit.
The startup has been given just three years to design, build, and flight test the spaceplane, which will serve as a testbed for hypersonic flight and defence research. Aurora could also be used as a small satellite carrier if fitted with a non-reusable upper stage.
Polaris was founded in 2019 as a spin-off from the German Aerospace Center (DLR), building upon over three decades of German and European spaceplane research. The startup has already built three demonstrators of its Aurora spaceplane, with the first crashing shortly after its inaugural flight, but the next two iterations — Mira-II and Mira-III — having better luck.
The German defence ministry’s investment in hypersonic spaceplane technology aims to provide a cost-effective and flexible solution for testing high-speed flight, and could potentially be a game-changer for the industry.