$250M for Sounding Rocket 3 Program

Black Brant XII(click to view full) As NASA’s sounding rocket program site tells us: “Sounding rockets carry scientific instruments into space along parabolic trajectories, providing nearly vertical traversals along their upleg and downleg, while appearing to “hover” near their apogee location. Whereas the overall time in space is brief (typically 5-20 minutes), for a well-placed scientific experiment launched into a geophysical phenomena of interest, the short time and low vehicle speeds are more than adequate (in some cases they are ideal) to carry out a successful scientific experiment. Furthermore, there are some important regions of space that are too low to be sampled by satellites (i.e., the lower ionosphere/ thermosphere and mesosphere below 120 km altitude) and thus sounding rockets provide the only platforms that can carry out direct in-situ measurements in these regions.” Some agency of the USAF has issued a set of indefinite-delivery/ indefinite-quantity contract for $250 million, allowing multiple awards within a 7-year ordering period to cover engineering and technical services that support the Sounding Rocket Program 3. SRP3 provides launch systems and services for sub-orbital ballistic trajectories up to 5,500 km downrange. At this time $200,000 has been obligated. The DefenseLINK announcement lists Robins AFB, which […]