Under the stewardship of Amelia Earhart from 1933, ‘Quincy Flying Boats’ abandoned both its name and luxury image to focus its attention on building the best possible planes science could offer. To this end, they have doggedly pursued projects deemed ‘too risky’ for other manufacturers, ranging from the featherweight Solar Soarer to the hypersonic Project A113 test bed, each time achieving what had been thought to be impossible. It is a small miracle that the company still exists with each ruinously expensive project bankrolled by forgiving clients buying into the next big leap that the company promised to deliver. Their late, great CEO Isabel Ebel described this relationship best as dancing on two knife edges: one of financial ruin and the other of what’s possible: remove either and the music stops.
Earhart’s fleet of single stage to orbit (SSTO) spaceplanes was their most recent endeavour, evolved from their work on a space shuttle successor, the Skylance. Each plane is able to lift 25T into LEO from any sufficiently long runway. To achieve this feat, the newly formed Earhart Foundry developed a mix of advanced polymer, metal, and ceramic matrix composite materials to achieve a suitably lightweight airframe. By combining this with a multi-billion dollar investment in the facilities and techniques needed to construct it, the Skylance was able to become cost competitive with Condor’s more traditional rocketry. Despite being slow to build and expensive to repair, this fleet was critical to the delivery of Beacon I & II, continuing to provide the most cost-effective way to get into orbit, although clients might have to wait a while for one to be available.
Pushing up against the limits of what contemporary materials could deliver, the Blue Hills laboratory was opened by Earhart Foundry to develop new superalloys, composites, and ceramics for space operations. In collaboration with nearby universities, Earhart Foundry is able to rapidly create, screen, and test material variants for yield, creep, and fatigue to meet their increasingly demanding specifications. This has resulted in several ‘first-principles’ wall panels concepts for orbital settlements which are less than 3 mm thick, allowing for significant shipping cost reductions. Having opened a testing lab on Beacon II, they are now also developing methods that use lunar resources to produce the lightweight and strong materials that they’ve become famous for. With this, they hope to provide more options for structural engineers outside of the steel and aluminium constructions that have been dominant up to this point. These continuing innovations have aimed to give Earhart a constant technological edge over its competitors: while they were wrapping their heads around the current technology, Earhart was already flying with the next.
“Never do things others can do and will do if there are things others cannot do or will not do.”
Amelia Earhart
This webpage refers to a fictional company which is part of the UK Space Design Competition. This fictional company is named in tribute to a real person, but no information presented here or implied herefrom should be regarded as factual. Any similarities with real events, places, or persons are purely coincidental.