Thomas RÖHR, Frank SCHEUERPFLUG, Josef ETTL, Dietmar KAIL, Christian MILDENBERGER, Johannes RIEHMER, Christian SCHNEPF, Rainer KIRCHHARTZ
DOI Number: 10.60853/s9gq-zz72
Conference number: HiSST-2024-00367
The Red Kite© is a commercially available, serially produced and ITAR-free solid propellant sounding rocket motor in the class of one ton of Net Explosive Mass. It was flight qualified in November 2023 at the Andøya Space launch site in Norway after five years of development. The flight was named SOAR (Single Stage Operational Assessment of Red Kite) and was administered by DLR-RB-MRB1. Main objective of the flight was to collect a body of data sufficient to determine flight worthiness of the Red Kite. Secondary objective was to propel APEX-TD (Air Breathing Propulsion Experiment – Technology Demonstrator) by DLR-AS-HYP2 to high speed in the low atmosphere to enable in-situ research on the flow characteristics inside a passive Scramjet type duct. Both objectives required live streaming of data to ground because the vehicle was not equipped with a parachute recovery system. Both objectives were fully met. The vehicle reached an apogee of 71 km, a maximum speed of Mach 4.8 and impacted the Norwegian Sea 59 km from the launch site. Thus, SOAR demonstrated the capability of Red Kite and DLR-RB-MRB1 supplementary systems to provide the scientific community with an easy, reliable and highly customizable flight from one of multiple launch sites around the world. The paper describes the SOAR mission design, execution and results as well as noteworthy observations from vehicle and ground based instruments.