A Franco-German spaceplane is intended to carry astronauts into space in the future. The spaceplane, called Vortex, is being jointly developed by French company Dassault and German aerospace group OHB and is “explicitly intended for crewed spaceflight,” OHB Deputy Chief Executive Markus Moeller said on Tuesday at a meeting with specialist journalists in Paris.
A demonstrator is scheduled to be developed by 2028 to test the conditions during reentry into the atmosphere, the heat resistance of the materials and the landing. A prototype is planned for 2031. There is not yet a date for a crewed flight. Vortex is intended as an alternative to space capsules. After reentering the atmosphere, the vehicle is designed to deliberately land on a runway.
OHB joined the project in May, which Dassault had presented the previous year at the Paris-Le Bourget Air Show. The French government supports the project. European access to space was a prominent topic at a space meeting convened by French President Emmanuel Macron last week.
Vortex is a new Franco-German project following the failure of the jointly developed Future Combat Air System (FCAS), in which Dassault was involved on the French side and Airbus on the German side. The project was abandoned, among other reasons, because of a dispute between the participating companies over their respective areas of expertise. “What did not succeed with FCAS, we hope to achieve with Vortex,” Dassault chief Eric Trappier said in May.
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