Rocket propelled cargo

Knight Aerospace pursues opportunities in the future of transport

On a recent afternoon, Knight Aerospace CEO Bianca Rhodes stood inside a 40-foot-long container outfitted with medical equipment and designed to plug into Royal Canadian Air Force cargo planes, rapidly converting them into flying emergency rooms.

San Antonio-based Knight Aerospace’s turnkey container, known as the Aeromedical BioContainment Module, has brought the company international attention and lifted its industry profile.

And now it stands to reach for new heights — and speeds — under a recent federal government contract that could put its products on rockets and perhaps into space. The company, whose headquarters are at Port San Antonio on the Southwest Side, aims to design containers for the future that the Defense Department envisions using on rockets to deliver military and medical supplies anywhere in the world at unprecedented speeds.

“It’s a new way of transportation that needs to be figured out,” Rhodes said about using rockets to move cargo between points on Earth and beyond. “Our specialty is developing a good structure that’s air worthy, so it doesn’t matter what the structure is.”

Knight Aerospace was recently awarded $3.75 million in Small Business Innovation Research, or SBIR, contracts by the Air Force Research Laboratory to build “lowcost, intermodal cargo containers for point-to-point rocket transport” as part of an initiative called the INTermodel Rocket CONtainer, or INTRCON.

The new business venture comes as the U.S. Air Force and U.S. Space Force, under the Rocket Cargo Vanguard program, seek private companies to help the

SpaceX/Courtesy SpaceX has a a five-year, $102 million contract with the Air Force Research Laboratory to explore how reusable rocket systems can be used to transport cargo.

William Luther/Staff photographer Knight Aerospace CEO Bianca Rhodes stands inside one of the company’s biomedical containment modules at Port San Antonio.