The Dawn Mk-II Aurora has all the qualities of an aircraft but with a rocket engine it can fly faster and higher than any jet. Photo: Dawn Aerospace
Dawn Aerospace aims to make transporting things to space - whether supplies to the ISS or pharmaceuticals for testing - cheaper, faster and greener
It has all the qualities of an aircraft but with its rocket engine, the Dawn Mk-II Aurora can fly faster and higher than any jet.
"We have a real path to this being the first vehicle that flies to 100 km altitude - the border of space - twice in a day," says Stefan Powell, a co-founder of Dawn Aerospace.
"No one's ever done that."
Dawn Aerospace is a New Zealand company working on developing greener and more convenient alternatives to traditional space transportation.
By now the company has over 120 employees spread across its headquarters here and in the Netherlands, but Powell says it all started with a group of university students who had a shared goal.
"We decided we wanted to break the European altitude records for sub-orbital rockets, so we got together and we started building quite big rockets.
"To do that we actually needed to develop new propellants that were appropriate for students to use because rockets are generally pretty complicated... so we actually ended up developing entirely new classes of rockets," he says.
After convincing the Spanish military to let them use their base in the south of Spain as a launch pad, Powell and his classmates successfully broke the record in 2015.
This was during a time where satellite launching really started ramping up, but Powell says it was clear this trajectory wasn't sustainable. For example, some of the fuels used for satellites were incredibly toxic.
"A teaspoon of hydrazine in this room will kill everyone, it's just gnarly and toxic. It's a great propellant - don't get me wrong, it's worked super well for 70 years now so there's a reason that they use it - but it's mostly militaries and governments and whatnot that have billion-dollar budgets that can deal with this level of toxicity," he says.
In 2017 Powell, alongside Jeroen Wink, Tobias Knop, James Powell and Robert Werner launched Dawn Aerospace, beginning their mission towards a greener and cheaper way of space transportation.
In this episode, The Detail gets a tour of the company's headquarters in Christchurch where Powell explains how satellite propulsion systems and the Mk-II Aurora space plane work.
"A normal aircraft can only take off at about a 20- to 30-degree angle because that's just as much power as they have. We're a rocket in the sense that we have a rocket engine and as we burn more propellant, we get lighter and our rocket engine gets more efficient as we go higher," he says.
Powell says space transportation is not only used to get satellites into space. Scientists across various fields use it too.
Right now the plane can fly to sub-orbital level, i.e. the border of space, but the ultimate goal is to get it flying all the way into space twice a day.
"That's always been the dream," he says.
Powell says the Aurora will also offer a easier, cheaper way for various other space activities, including for scientists developing new medication.
"They already go to the International Space Station for that. But that's tens of millions of dollars per test that they want to do, it takes years to actually get on station and then years to actually get your sample back. But with us, they'll be able to fly multiple times a week at a much much lower cost."
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