Dylan Small

✅ fully-assembled supersonic turbine

A rocket is, above all, a system for managing an enormous amount of energy. Its engine turns the energy of combustion into directed thrust. Engineering is a matter of direction too. Without it, effort goes to waste - time, compute and talent don't get you far if they're aimed at the wrong problem. Our partnership with @leap_71 is about getting that direction right. Their model, Noyron, generates fully manufacturing-ready engine designs for both stages of Oryx straight from first-principles physics. Over the past two years, LEAP 71 has hot-fired around 20 different engines, bell nozzles and aerospikes alike, each one feeding real test data back into Noyron. That body of data now underpins a 1,000 kN engine for Oryx's first stage. For the second stage, we've run two parallel paths from day one: a conventional bell nozzle and an aerospike. Full-scale versions of both are coming up for hot-fire soon. The aerospike suits our fully reusable upper stage well. It drops the fixed design point of a conventional nozzle, and 3D printing drops most of the assembly. We print the engine as one piece, so there are far fewer joints to seal and parts to fit together. That's the kind of rocket we're building – one designed for software-speed iteration. Such flexibility goes beyond propulsion. From day one, Oryx has been designed without ITAR- or EAR-controlled content, so the same fully reusable launch and cargo-return system can serve scientific, commercial and national security missions around the world.