Swiss Space Systems preparing for a big 2016

Officials from Swiss Space Systems were in the middle of the excitement last week during the YYB North Bay Space Week festivities.    

The year 2016 will be a big year for S3 as they are anticipating the launch of their Zero Gravity flights out of North Bay in the spring or summer plus more testing is going into the research into their plan to launch satellites off their SOAR Space Shuttle which would one day be launched horizontally off the S3 Zero Gravity airliner.  

“We have continued our work in Europe to develop the rockets and get the rockets tested. We’ve done the wind tunnel testing that has been completed now and we have the data from the different mac levels that we can compare against our computer design analysis,” said S3’s Robert Feierbach during Space Week in North Bay. 

S3 was hoping to do more testing in North Bay this fall but that has been pushed back to the spring of 2016. 

“One thing that is remaining is to complete the drop test and that’s with a small scale model which we because of weather issues we will do very likely in the late spring depending on what we can coordinate with local authorities here and NAV Canada and so forth,” said Feierbach.   

“We will have a team here that will actually come in and fly, do a few rounds with a helicopter and if we feel confident we will release that from 12,500 meters and have the small SOAR Shuttle come and land itself onto the airport,” he concluded. 

While the Zero Gravity flights seem like the most exciting initiative, Feierbach believes the that small satellite launch technology is the real key.  

“There is new funding coming in from the Palo-Alto types that are funding these kinds of ventures now for small satellites with great analytics, app based type of analytics that are available to mine all the data that will be provided for by these small satellites so someone has to launch those and the need is dramatic today because there just isn’t enough launch capacity in the world for these small satellites so we plan on being there as one of the strong players there, there are other companies that are doing this as well and it’s a list of about 10 companies that are very intent on having a part of this launch business,” he said.