Anduril, Blue Origin to study how to transport cargo from orbit to Earth for the Pentagon

Blue Origin and Anduril have landed new study contracts with the U.S. Air Force to explore how their technology, including rockets, could move military cargo around the world.

The contracts under the Air Force’s Rocket Cargo program are relatively small — Blue Origin’s comes in at $1.37 million and Anduril’s at $1 million. But they could be the first steps in revolutionizing how the Pentagon transports cargo. Study contracts like these are also a strong signal as to which players will later compete for larger-dollar funding.

Anduril’s contract is especially intriguing and suggests the defense startup is making forays into an entirely new business line.

The two awards fall under the U.S. Air Force Research Laboratory’s Rocket Experimentation for Global Agile Logistics (REGAL) program. Blue Origin did not respond to TechCrunch’s request for comment, and an Anduril spokesperson directed TechCrunch to AFRL.

REGAL is the experimentation arm of AFRL’s larger Rocket Cargo program, which is focused on “delivery as a service” via orbital transport. The Air Force wants to procure these capabilities via service-type contracts, similar to how the DoD contracts commercial airlines. The aim of the REGAL program is to prove out commercial, reusable rockets, reentry systems, and cargo transportation systems to enable deliveries to remote or hard-to-reach theaters in less than an hour.

While there isn’t much public information about REGAL’s scope of work or timeline, the requests for proposals that underlie the awards contain some interesting information.

Blue Origin’s contract, according to the sparse award listing, is for an analysis of how its tech could support “point-to-point material transportation.” The listed place of performance is Merritt Island, Florida, Blue Origin’s home on the Space Coast and where it is developing the heavy-lift New Glenn rocket.

Anduril’s design study contract, which also falls under REGAL, was awarded under a separate call for proposals called “Payload Reentry from Space Development and Demonstrations.”

Cutting through the jargon, the proposal implies Anduril will study how to develop a reentry container that can carry between five tons to 10 tons of payload from Earth and back. The listing, which can be viewed on SAM.gov, emphasized that the container needs to work with different rocks and the study should propose a thermal protection system. Anduril’s “payload container,” as the listing calls it, should integrate multiple government-defined payloads and work across platforms.

Reentry is a notoriously difficult problem to solve in spaceflight. Developing materials that can survive atmospheric reentry, and a container that doesn’t completely destroy the contents involved, is a challenge. A handful of startups, like Varda Space Industries, have developed reentry capsules for in-space manufacturing, and SpaceX’s Dragon capsule brings back cargo and astronauts from the ISS. But overall, the number of vendors that can deliver this capability is limited.

The news of the two contracts, which haven’t been reported, follows on Rocket Lab’s own REGAL contract that was announced earlier this year. That contract explicitly has a flight demonstration step, though AFRL hasn’t released other details on that award, like the amount.

If rocket cargo services mature, the Pentagon could buy “delivery as a service,” with massive loads riding a commercial heavy rocket and returning to Earth inside a capsule for quick offload. Long-term, AFRL said the program could even include point-to-point transportation of humans.

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