SBIR Phase II: Liquid Oxygen (LOX) - Methane Engine for Small Satellite Launch Vehicles

The broader impact/commercial potential of this Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase II project is to create a rocket engine manufacturing business that would supply off-the-shelf, inexpensive, and reusable engines for current and future civilian and military rocket builders that want to launch small payloads to space. There are currently only two established companies that offer large engines exclusively to other big companies or military at production cost of over $1 million. A growing number of startups wish to build and launch small rockets to space to provide climate sensing, secure U.S. space infrastructure, and accelerate global trade by precision tracking of transportation fleets to prevent costly delays and accidents. In many cases, however, companies needing access to space cannot acquire the required engines either because they are too costly or heavy for these goals. The proposed innovation will close this gap by offering a lightweight rocket engine at a ten-fold lower unit production cost. The production of these engines will advance manufacturing and the technical workforce, increase economic competitiveness, and support the U.S. national defense. This SBIR Phase II project proposes to conduct hot-fire testing of the rocket engine prototype built in Phase I with the goal of demonstrating performance, reliability, reusability, and scalability to future higher thrust levels for this engine. The work will demonstrate and improve engine performance at low/high power levels and propellant mixture ratios enabling iterations to higher performance. This testing will proceed with the combustion devices tested first (thrust chamber assembly and pre-burner), followed by powerpack (pre-burner + turbopump) testing, and full integrated engine testing. This testing and research and development will lead to improvements in part-level geometry and the underlying analytical and computational fluid dynamic (CFD) non-reacting and reacting models, including chemical reaction mechanisms in CFD models, to achieve required component-level performance in terms of pressure losses/rises and combustion temperatures. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.