Micro-Space accomplished its first “Hot Fire Test” in our upgraded test facility today. As noted previously, this setup allows much of the flight qualified hardware to be tested in an integrated configuration. This includes fuel level monitors for preflight and inflight monitoring, a new, lightweight ignition system, and a system to enhance the reliability of our motors in “Rapid Restart” situations. The instrumented thrust range has also been tripled to allow testing higher thrust motors, and the fuel system has been reconfigured to make the documentation of consumed fuel mass more accurate. The bipropellant systems have also been configured for more rapid loading, and expeditious unloading of fuel (the later is required for NGLL flight operations, so that the vehicle can be transported safely after a scrubbed flight).

Today's test in many ways repeated a previous test with a slightly modified motor design. Again, the motor started immediately and came up smoothly to the intended thrust. With different illumination, this is the first time that we have been able to see (and photograph) clear “Mach Diamonds” in our nearly transparent exhaust jet. The “Diamond” spacing responded as predicted to throttling and our motors again demonstrated more than a 5 to 1 throttled thrust range.

Predictable thrust with this new production motor, combined with excellent ignition and smooth throttling leave no propulsion problems for our “NG Lunar Lander” competitor. We will be defining our delivered ISP more accurately soon, but it is already sufficient for our planned, 90 second hover Lander. Good results with this new production batch of motors already gives us sufficient thrust, from a small cluster of motors, for our HTS (Human Transport System). Tests of this could come as little as two months after flight testing of the “NG Lunar Lander”. As previously noted, since these propulsion systems use storable fuels (Hydrogen Peroxide and Methyl Alcohol) they can also be used on the Moon for the Google Prize, and for the “Lunar Transfer” flight from LEO.

The thrust vectoring we use for control is already operational for the flight ready vehicle, as are the accelerometer and gyro subsystems. We have done extensive modeling of the “Hover” control dynamics, and of course this effort builds on our analysis and successful flight of three “Finless”, near hover guided rockets more than a decade ago. Much system's integration work remains to be done of course. Very soon we will start posing new Video of Tests on YouTube.