Draft:FAST Aerospace

FAST Aerospace is an Italian collective of engineers symbolically founded in 2022 that is currently working on the design, development and building of an hypersonic TSTO used for the delivery of small satellites in Low Earth Orbit (LEO). The company claims that its product, an autonomous aircraft called HyperDart, will be able to take off from many European airports and land back at the same location after completing its mission.

Although many members are Politecnico di Milano alumni, the group has some members that come form other Italian universities, too.

History
The group was first formed in autumn 2021 to enroll in the Student Aerospace Challenge, a European competition for universities' students, with various categories. The group chose to design a combined cycle multimode engine, capable of hauling a 100-passengers airplane from Rome to Tokyo in under two hours. At the time the team was composed by seven people, all students at Polytechnic University of Milan in the aerospace engineering faculty and members of Polispace, the university's first students' space association.

The result of such work was called Trinity, and its phase-A design was awarded by the same jury the "Ariane Group" prize, for its technical goodness and adherence to challenge requirements

After the challenge, the team presented Trinity at the International Astronautical Congress, held in Paris in 2022, gathering the attention of other industry players such as Destinus.

Later that year, some of the people that worked on Trinity chose to turn the group into a pre-seed startup, changing the scope of the project from the engine design challenge to the realization of a full launcher, with the propulsive unit deriving from the former engine. This launcher is called HyperDart, and, according to the group's website, it would fall in the TSTO category, a family of space launchers composed by only two stages.

Since autumn 2022, the team has been developing HyperDart under all its aspects, from the technical point of view to the business point of view. Among this development there is a nation-wide recruitment campaign conducted by the team in late spring 2023, that brought the group from 5 to 12 people currently working on the project.

Past

 * IAC-22,C4,7,4,x70325 - "Concept design of a combined cycle hydrolox engine for commercial suborbital spaceflight applications"


 * IAC-23,D2,2,10,x77670 - "Trajectory Optimization for Multi-Stage systems: A combined Airbreathing and Rocket Approach"
 * IAC-23,D2,IPB,1,x77672 - "Trade-off studies on mission architecture and configuration of a small partially reusable stratolauncher for smallsat LEO delivery"

HyperDart
The group has declared that it is currently working on a vehicle for space transportation called HyperDart, that promises partial reusability and launch cost reduction. The vehicle, an unmanned and remotely controlled drone with autonomous capabilities, would be able to carry into LEO a payload of up to 250 kg. However, it is not clear what will be the mode of delivery (e.g. dedicated launch or rideshare).

HyperDart would be composed of two parts:


 * a carrier, or first stage, with lifting surfaces and an airbreathing propulsive unit composed of a low-bypass turbofan coupled with a ramjet, suited for hypersonic speeds;
 * a rocket, or second stage, that at a designed altitude and speed would detach form the carrier and complete its insertion into orbit, thus delivering the payload and completing the mission.

The propulsive unit of the carrier would be derived from the former engine concept, Trinity, although with great modifications. One over the others is the elimination of the rocket engine from the first stage. Moreover, the propellant used for the engine would not be hydrogen, like it was with Trinity, but Jet-A instead. This might have to do with the great challenges that the use of hydrogen in the aviation industry poses, often related to its difficult storability, although there are concepts of hypersonic planes that run on this propellant. With the use of hydrocarbons, FAST Aerospace has probably chosen to grant more flexibility and ease of use to an already greatly innovative the system, on the expenses of being the leader of hydrogen aviation propulsion.