Bremen-based startup POLARIS Spaceplanes has announced that its MIRA demonstrator was damaged during a takeoff incident.
The incident occurred during a test flight that was part of the company’s preparation for the vehicle’s first rocket-powered flight. During the test, MIRA was on the runway traveling at approximately 170 kilometres an hour when it was hit with a combination of landing gear steering reaction and side wind. The resulting hard landing concluded the flight far more rapidly than POLARIS would have liked.
Although the incident was far from planned, it did give the company a chance to test its safety procedures in real-life conditions. POLARIS confirmed that following the incident, all safety procedures were performed flawlessly by the vehicle’s onboard systems. This included depressurizing the propellant tanks, venting LOX (liquid oxygen), and pumping kerosene out of the tanks. The flight termination system’s pyrotechnics were also returned to safe mode, allowing ground crews to approach the vehicle safely.
While the incident did not damage many of MIRA’s subsystems, the fiber-reinforced airframe, which was produced by Aachen-based aerospace prototype and manufacturing company Up2-Tec, will need to be rebuilt.
In a statement following the incident, the company explained that accidents like this are always a possibility when pursuing rapid development of new technology.
“At POLARIS, we are advancing our project at an exceptionally rapid pace. To facilitate such swift progress, we fully accept that sometimes things can break.” The statement concluded with an uncredited quote explaining, “If you don’t break things, you are not ambitious enough.”
Despite the setback of needing to rebuild the demonstration vehicle’s airframe, POLARIS has no plans to slow its rapid progress. The company is already preparing its larger MIRA-II and MIRA-III variants for flight. The company did, however, not specify when it is likely to begin testing these vehicles.
