Meet Launcher, a rocket engine building company with eight employees

Max Haot is not your typical rocket scientist and Launcher is not your typical rocket company.

To be fair, Haot is by no means a rocket scientist. More of a video and tech guy, he started his career in the late 1990s managing digital operations for IMG Media and later founding Livestream. He had always maintained a deep interest in space, however, and in 2017 when he started looking around for something else to do, he went back to those dreams.

Haot saw the opening of the cosmos as a momentous event in human history. “UI think if humans are around in 10,000 years, the most important events will be Sputnik and the moon landings, “he said.” I wanted to contribute to this “.

Despite a growing number of launch companies, Haot felt he wasn’t too late for the game. Rather, it had just begun. If the space age was to last 10,000 years, it would only be 50. In 2017, Haot acknowledged that SpaceX had built a dominant launch activity with its Falcon 9 rocket and expected Rocket Lab to be successful with launch. of small satellites. However, he believed there was a niche between these two companies, with an efficient, high-performance rocket capable of lifting around 1 ton into low Earth orbit.

Ten-year plan

Haot did not start Launcher in March 2017 with the intent of running madly to the launch pad as quickly as possible, as Elon Musk had done with SpaceX and other companies were trying to do. He didn’t have that kind of money. Rather, he would keep his company small …really small—To keep expenses low and use additive manufacturing wherever possible. He had a ten-year plan to achieve profitability. And he stayed true to that. The Brooklyn, New York-based company has just eight US employees, along with 10 other people in Ukraine who help with the design work.

The first step in Hoat’s plan is to develop a rocket engine with 22,000 pounds of thrust. This wouldn’t be a super powerful engine, but this “Engine-2” would have nearly four times the thrust of the Rutherford engines that power Rocket Lab’s Electron booster. Haot has set itself the goal of developing and testing this engine within four years, and for $ 10 million or less.

During an interview last week, Haot said the company remains on track to deliver E-2, a “high-performance” liquid engine for small launch rockets. This engine has several optimizations, one is the use of liquid oxygen, instead of kerosene at room temperature, to regeneratively cool the throat and cylinder of the engine. The goal of these and other modifications is to achieve a combustion power, or C-star, value of 98 percent, which is quite high.

In 2019, the company built and tested a small prototype engine, “E-1”. This was very successful, so last month the company took the first components of its E-2 engine to a test bed at NASA’s Stennis Space Center in Mississippi. During the first two series of tests, Launcher demonstrated that the dyno and its fuel injector, which mixes liquid oxygen and kerosene, worked well. The third test was to evaluate the performance of the engine’s 3D printed combustion chamber, where the fuels burn. This test did not go as well as three of the regenerative cooling channels were clogged and the chamber overheated.

Oh well, building and testing rocket engines is a complicated process.

Rockets, in the end

The company has its next window to test in Stennis in March, so it will be back with a new 3D printed combustion chamber and more new engine components. Haot said the company plans to conduct a full-scale engine test later in 2021, meeting its four-year timeline. It also kept the costs manageable. So far, Launcher has raised $ 6 million, which includes private funding and a $ 1.5 million Air Force Small Business Innovation Research Grant to accelerate the development of the E-2 engine.

Provided Launcher can deliver on its promise of developing an engine, it plans to sell it to other interested companies and build their own rockets. The first launch pad vehicle would be the “Launcher Light” rocket, with a single first stage engine, ready for flight by 2024 with a capacity of 150 kg in low earth orbit. It would be followed by a larger rocket, with four first-stage engines.

Haot estimates that his company can develop its first rocket for under $ 50 million, which would be a real coup if it were to happen. This is because most small rockets require two, four or more times this amount of capital to achieve an initial launch. But the trade-off is that Launcher will have to stay small and lean and take a slower route. This is fine for Haot.

“From day one we had a 10-year plan,” he said. “The timing hasn’t changed. We are on track for engine testing at the end of 2021. You shouldn’t really focus on a very aggressive timeline where you need to cut corners on propulsion.”