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Headquartered in Houston and the UK, NewSpace company Excalibur Almaz has entered into a Space Act Agreement (SAA) with NASA for its Commercial Crew Development Level 2 program (CCDev-2). Astrium (propulsion, guidance etc.), Paragon (life support), USA (Shuttle mission integrators) and Lockheed Martin (systems engineering & integration) are partners.
This SAA is unfunded by NASA, but then Lockheed Martin and Shuttle SRB maker ATK also have unfunded SSA's for the Liberty launcher. What EA gains is access to NASA's centers and facilities for testing and analysis. What NASA gains is another layer of redundancy in the program.
EA was founded by several former high level managers and aerospace engineers from NASA and the Russian space program. Their hardware is based on the Almaz military space station and TKS spacecraft flown by the USSR. They are taking the basic hardware and modernizing it.
TKS consisted of two modules; the VA crew return capsule (AKA Merkur) and the Functional Cargo Block (FGB) which housed its orbital maneuvering system (OMS) engines, other systems and upbound cargo.
The Almaz (Diamond) space station was known in the West as Salyut, the civilian cover for a mostly military project. Almaz was the only known spacecraft to have an integrated weapon, a 23 mm Nudelman rapid-fire cannon in the forward end of the station, though Soyuz flights still carry a 3-barreled rifle-shotgun combo gun in their survival packs.
TKS left - Almaz right
Headquartered in Houston and the UK, NewSpace company Excalibur Almaz has entered into a Space Act Agreement (SAA) with NASA for its Commercial Crew Development Level 2 program (CCDev-2). Astrium (propulsion, guidance etc.), Paragon (life support), USA (Shuttle mission integrators) and Lockheed Martin (systems engineering & integration) are partners.
This SAA is unfunded by NASA, but then Lockheed Martin and Shuttle SRB maker ATK also have unfunded SSA's for the Liberty launcher. What EA gains is access to NASA's centers and facilities for testing and analysis. What NASA gains is another layer of redundancy in the program.
EA was founded by several former high level managers and aerospace engineers from NASA and the Russian space program. Their hardware is based on the Almaz military space station and TKS spacecraft flown by the USSR. They are taking the basic hardware and modernizing it.
TKS consisted of two modules; the VA crew return capsule (AKA Merkur) and the Functional Cargo Block (FGB) which housed its orbital maneuvering system (OMS) engines, other systems and upbound cargo.
The Almaz (Diamond) space station was known in the West as Salyut, the civilian cover for a mostly military project. Almaz was the only known spacecraft to have an integrated weapon, a 23 mm Nudelman rapid-fire cannon in the forward end of the station, though Soyuz flights still carry a 3-barreled rifle-shotgun combo gun in their survival packs.
TKS left - Almaz right