Suggested Citation:
Sarigul-Klijn, Marti M., Nesrin Sarigul-Klijn, Gary Hudson, Livingston Holder, Dan Fritz, Chris Webber, Gregg Liesman, Dale Shell, Maurice Gionfriddo (2007) Flight Testing of a Gravity Air Launch Method to Enable Responsive Space Access. AIAA Space 2007 Conference and Exposition

In June 2003, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) held an open competition and selected 9 companies for six month Phase 1 studies for a Small Launch Vehicle (SLV). The Falcon SLV program objectives are to develop and demonstrate technologies that will allow the country to execute time-critical small satellite launch missions. In September 2004, DARPA held another open competition and selected 4 companies for further Phase 2A studies and demonstrations. In September 2005, DARPA selected AirLaunch LLC to continue with further Phase 2B studies and demonstrations. In June 2007, DARPA and the U.S. Air Force funded AirLaunch LLC for Phase 2C. AirLaunch LLC is developing a SLV called the QuickReach™ that is carried by and launched from an existing military cargo aircraft. AirLaunch developed a new launch method called Gravity Air Launch (GAL) that greatly improves simplicity, safety, and reliability of air launching from an unmodified cargo aircraft as compared to existing methods that rely on standard heavy equipment airdrop procedures and equipment. Unlike the standard heavy equipment airdrop method, GAL imparts much of the launch carrier aircraft's altitude and airspeed onto the rocket, which in turn improves payload mass to orbit.

This paper describes the studies and series of successful flight tests that demonstrated the feasibility of AirLaunch’s GAL launch method and resulted in expanded drop test capability of the C-17A aircraft.