How to Deliver 100 Tons of Cargo Globally In One Hour

A new U.S. Space Force initiative aims to take military logistics support into the future with rockets.

Military professionals generally agree that logistics is the key factor to winning on the battlefield. In today’s complex military environments, supplying units that may be small, mobile and widely spaced is a difficult and expensive undertaking. This is especially true when cargoes must be airlifted halfway around the world to staging bases, then transferred to helicopters or motor vehicles for delivery.  

The U.S. Space Force has started a high-priority research program administered by the USAF to investigate the possibility of using reusable, propulsive landed rockets to deliver critical cargoes to any spot-on earth—in under one hour. SpaceX has secured a contract, and now Long Beach, California based Rocket Lab has joined the team and will be investigating the company’s current spacecraft as potential test vehicles. If it works, rocket delivery could revolutionize military operations. Jim Anderton explains. 

Access all episodes of This Week in Engineering on engineering.com TV along with all of our other series.

Transcript of this week’s show:

To see any graphs, charts, graphics, images, and/or videos to which the transcript may be referring, watch the above video.

In military operations, speed has always been essential. Getting troops—and just as importantly, the supplies they need—to the front line, insertion point or forward operating base can make the difference between success or disaster. 

Airplanes changed warfare fundamentally, not as weapons of war but for the ability to carry people and cargo in hours instead of days. Getting there first matters, but what if personnel could be resupplied in minutes instead of hours? That’s the premise of a Cooperative Research and Development Agreement (CRADA) between the United States Transportation Command ( ) and Long Beach California-based Rocket Lab USA: to explore the possibility of using the company’s Neutron and Electron launch vehicles to transport cargo around the world.  

The agreement will also explore the possibility of establishing in-orbit cargo depots and the re-entry requirements to deliver them to the surface. Rocket Cargo is administered by the Air Force Research Laboratory and is considered a “Vanguard” program. This is a high-importance technology development effort with an ambitious target: to deliver the cargo carried typically by a C-17 Globemaster 2 jet freighter, approximately 100 tons, to anywhere on Earth in under one hour.  

The program envisions propulsion landed reusable rockets in a mission like the launch and landing of SpaceX Falcon boosters. The engineering challenge this presents is enormous. The largest and heaviest object returned from orbit intact was the Space Shuttle, a four and a half million-pound system at launch that could deliver 60,000 pounds to low Earth orbit and return 32,000 pounds. That’s one-third of the rocket cargo program target mass, using a piloted glider the size of the DC-9 airliner and landing on a prepared runway.  

The technical challenge is clear. An alternative technology could be a hybrid system of lift vector management during reentry combined with a precision spot landing, possibly with a steerable parachute. This was proposed for a NASA space program in the mid-1960s, with a deployable Rogallo wing, but the system was never tested in spaceflight. A purely ballistic trajectory is possible, but the sustained braking thrust necessary to deliver the large payload to a soft landing will require enormous tankage.  

Plus, there is the technical problem of reentering the atmosphere with a large load of propellant and oxidizer onboard. A hybrid approach might use a precision skimming reentry profile, then winged vehicle to glide to the vicinity of the touchdown point, and then perhaps a parachute and landing rockets.  

Can it be done?  

SpaceX appears to have solved the guidance and soft-landing equation for large vehicles, and the Space Shuttle developed reusable thermal protection for the heatshield. But soft-landing 50 tons of freight with a reusable vehicle under rocket thrust is a very ambitious goal. The Rocket Lab test vehicles are small, but many critical cargoes could be usefully delivered with a small vehicle, such as vaccines or emergency medical supplies to disaster areas.  

The military advantages of global deployment of logistics support in one hour, anywhere on Earth are obvious, and if it works, the logical development step would be to carry humans as well.  

It’s a long way off, but the future of air travel may not involve airplanes at all.

Written by

James Anderton

Jim Anderton is the Director of Content for ENGINEERING.com. Mr. Anderton was formerly editor of Canadian Metalworking Magazine and has contributed to a wide range of print and on-line publications, including Design Engineering, Canadian Plastics, Service Station and Garage Management, Autovision, and the National Post. He also brings prior industry experience in quality and part design for a Tier One automotive supplier.