Rockoons: Can We Achieve Orbit...With an Airship?

Frequenters of my blog will already know about my love affair with airships. But while most think of them as a charming relic of the past, they may well be not only the future of air travel, but of space travel as well. "A wiggity-wiggity-whaaaaat??" you say. But it's true!

JP Aerospace was founded in 1999 by John Marchel Powell, known as "JP", as well as Michael Stucky and Scott Mayo. Their first attempt at suborbital flight using a rocket launched from a balloon was a failure. But the concept is so promising, naturally they didn't stop there and are still at it today.

JP Aerospace frequently sends balloons with scientific payloads to the edge of space, including student projects like pongsats. Pongsats are ping pong ball sized micro satellites which do not enter orbit, but carry out their own dedicated little experiment from the balloon at a near-space altitude.

That's just the educational outreach stuff though. While that's a laudable goal in its own right, JP Aerospace ultimately wants to reach orbit. That requires nothing less than lifting a launchpad and rocket, via helium balloons, to the edge of space where the rocket will be launched. This saves tremendously on fuel.

The "Dark Sky Station" model proved the stability of their starfish configuration. The final version, seen below, will not be suspended from conventional weather balloons. Rather the entire thing will be one huge starfish shaped gas bag providing the lift and stability needed for safe rocket launches.

This is no fantasy, or fever dream. JP Aerospace is hard at work on their "Ascender", a more modest V-shaped airship which utilizes the same construction methods as Dark Sky Station, but will itself be propelled into suborbital space by attached rocket boosters. The gas bag is for the most part complete:

What's more, the Ascender will be manned. Just a single occupant mind you, the pilot, but that's a huge step forward for a near-space program which has until now exclusively sent up unmanned payloads. It represents the crossing of a threshold in many ways, as now a human life is at stake.

The pilot cabin has already been built. Looking something like a submersible but with big, flat windows (as the pressure differential at the target altitude is not sufficient for that to be a problem) it carries O2 bottles and CO2 absorbant well in excess of what will be needed for the duration of the mission, as is standard practice for life critical systems on spacecraft.

It's a big question mark whether JP Aerospace will succeed in this endeavor. But if so, it will mark a historic occasion. Unlike SpaceX, JP Aerospace isn't receiving NASA contracts. It's making due with a shoestring budget. It's got that adventurous, "anything can happen" feeling of a couple of brilliant guys in a workshop building what may very well be the future of space travel.

If they succeed, future generations may look back on the early days of JP Aerospace in much the same way that we now look back on the Gemini program. Meanwhile astronauts, possibly civilians as well, will be making routine flights to orbit aboard rocket propelled airships, while satellites are launched from high altitude floating platforms the likes of which can scarcely be envisioned today.