The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency is looking for a way to reduce the cost and scheduling constraints that affect satellite launches by borrowing a page from Richard Branson’s space playbook. This week, DARPA announced the kickoff of the Experimental Spaceplane (XS-1) program, an unmanned reusable hypersonic vehicle that would carry a disposable second stage into suborbital space, launch it, and glide back to Earth—and be ready to be relaunched the next day.

The goal of the program is to dramatically shrink the cost of putting 3,000- to 5,000-pound satellites into orbit, down to under $5 million per launch. That’s pocket change compared to current space launches, which can cost from 10 to nearly 100 times that amount.

DARPA has picked three two-company teams to build demonstration vehicles for the project:

Boeing and Blue Origin, the commercial space vehicle company financed by Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos

Masten Space Systems, developers of the Xombie test bed robotic lunar landing vehicle, and commercial suborbital vehicle developer XCOR Aerospace

Northrop Grumman and Virgin Galactic

In an official statement on the program, DARPA program manager Jess Sponable said, “We chose performers who could prudently integrate existing and up-and-coming technologies and operations, while making XS-1 as reliable, easy-to-use and cost-effective as possible. We’re eager to see how their initial designs envision making spaceflight commonplace—with all the potential military, civilian, and commercial benefits that capability would provide.”

The project’s eventual technical goals are to develop a vehicle that can fly 10 times in 10 days, achieve a speed over Mach 10 at least once, and “launch a representative small payload to orbit,” according to the DARPA announcement of the program.

The Department of Defense has already been testing a smaller experimental reusable spacecraft, the Boeing X-37B space "drone," which is in effect a robotic space shuttle. The X-37 rides to orbit on a traditional rocket first stage, however.