The E2 Engine is a simple, robust, resilient machine. It starts up. It burns smooth. It shuts down. It’s tolerant to a variety of startup sequences and inlet conditions. Recently, a qualification E2 engine achieved a 4x life on total duration and starts. After 28 starts and 1300 seconds of run time, this fleet leader shows no signs of performance degradation. E2 wants to run, and it wants to run for a long time.  

It wasn’t always like this though; engine development is unforgiving. Thousands of decisions go into designing an engine, into architecting its sequences, and into building its test stands. When you go to start it up, they all need to be right. Otherwise, you’re likely to be exercising the test stand’s fire suppression system.  

I started the ABL engine program from scratch. Over the years, we have burned through hot walls, hard started chambers, and fine-tuned our turbomachinery. Along the way, we put together an excellent team of engineers and technicians. We built test stands and then we ran those test stands hard. We accumulated hours and hours of hotfire time across fifty different engines.

We worked relentlessly to create a flight-worthy engine system and went from nothing to having ten flight-worthy engines tested and installed on a rocket in under four years. I’m excited to talk through the path we took to get there.  

The E2 Engine 

You don’t get to a simple, robust, resilient engine by accident. The E2 engine runs on Jet-A and Liquid Oxygen, the most commonly available propellants in the world. It operates on the robust Gas Generator Cycle, and is powered by a single-shaft turbopump. The RS1 rocket uses E2 in three variants. Stage 2 uses the E2 Vacuum engine. Stage 1 uses E2 Sea Level Radial and Center. Center is a tightly-packaged double chamber variant of Radial mounted at the center of RS1’s aft end. Each generating over 16,000 lbf of thrust in vacuum, these engines are designed, manufactured, and tested in-house at ABL. 

My Background 

You might call me an unlikely candidate to lead an engine program from scratch, but I was hired by ABL in 2018 to do just that. My background was in commercial aircraft interiors, web development, semiconductor fab fluid components, and SpaceX Falcon 9 hydraulic systems. Rather than direct propulsion experience, I leaned on lifelong curiosity, mechanical intuition, and engineering practical solutions to a wide range of problems.  

In college I pursued the air and ground-based mechanical and aerospace engineering coursework, shunning classes on rocket engines and orbital mechanics. It wasn’t an exciting time for spaceflight. The Space Shuttle was heading towards retirement, and the remaining launch vehicles were primarily Russian and American rockets from the 1960s. Unless you were really paying attention, and I wasn’t, you knew nothing of the SpaceX Falcon 1 launches that were moving incrementally closer to orbit.  

In 2015 SpaceX’s repeated attempts to land boosters finally did catch my attention, and I joined the Falcon 9 stage systems team alongside ABL founder Harry O’Hanley. I learned a lot about reusability and what it takes to land rockets on barges and on land. Unfortunately, I didn’t learn as much about engines. I was obviously aware of them and how they worked but didn’t spend much time in or around them. I recall a coworker talking about an engine performance-related question they had asked an interviewee, where they scoffed at the inadequate answer they received, and which I myself would not have been able to do better than. 

All that is to say, I joined ABL as a blank slate. This meant two things: 1, I had to do a lot of research to figure out where to start. 2, I did not have any predispositions about designing an engine that could hold me back. I was a team of one and I hit the textbooks, NASA monographs, and research papers on rocket engines to start wrapping my head around the problem.   

Design 

NASA monographs, describing in detail the design problems central to rocket engines and their components and their solutions engineered in the 1960s, are available to the world at nasa.gov. Reading through these, you end up with thousands of tidbits, ranging through rules of thumb, key ratios, materials that don’t work well in engines, materials that usually work well in engines, and so on. What they lack is a single best set of solutions for the specific type of engine you want to build, test, and operate. This is where the fun starts.  

Most rocket engine designs do not start with textbooks and monographs. They often have a starting point, whether it be a previous generation of engine within the same company, a legacy technology demonstrator that was crated up after completion awaiting a new owner, or key components or IP purchased from another entity.  

At ABL we started from a true clean sheet. Some small components – seals, bearings, sensors – were purchased from vendors, but everything else was designed from scratch. And not only the engine itself, but the test infrastructure, the test software, and entire test sites we built from bare dirt. Since our trade space was completely open, we had to move quickly to make key early decisions to limit that space to avoid the paralysis that too many choices can induce. A few things seemed obvious when looking at industry examples and the high level understanding we had of engines and engine manufacturing technology.  

First, engine cycle. All rocket engines combust propellants in a combustion chamber and accelerate the biproducts through a nozzle to generate thrust. The way the propellant gets to the combustion chamber is dictated by the type of engine cycle, each with its own advantages and disadvantages. These range from the pressure fed cycle, where the propellant tanks are held at a high pressure and propellant flows directly from them to the chamber, to the staged combustion cycle, where propellants flow through pumps and turbines and burn a bit of each along the way to self-power the pumps. We chose the gas generator cycle, which can provide moderate efficiency, and where each component can be tested and tuned on its own without requiring the others be present or even ready.  

With the cycle chosen we split out the four key areas to work on: 1. The turbopump, which takes propellants stored in the rocket at low pressures and pumps them up to the high pressures required to feed the engine’s combustion chamber. 2. The main combustion chamber. 3. The main chamber injector, which mixes the propellants coming into the chamber just so to ensure they mix and burn steadily and efficiently. 4. The gas generator, a small combustion chamber that provides pressurized hot gas to power a turbine that powers the turbopump.  

Before getting into any fine details, I gathered equations from textbooks and monographs into an excel spreadsheet that worked sequentially through sizing the requirements for each component. I later learned that this is called a “power balance” or “1D code” in industry. Basically, if you want X thrust, you must flow Y rate of propellants, and you must set the main combustion chamber exit to Z diameter. Parts of it were as simple as this, but when I added in the governing equations for turbopump impeller sizing it became fairly complicated. Time to get into detailed design.  

To divide up the work, I took the turbopump and main injector, and the other two engineers on the team took the main combustion chamber and gas generator.  

Turbopump

I dug in on the turbopump, a frightening device spinning at about 50,000 RPM and operating with a complex system of fluid passages and bearings and impellers and turbines. A typical turbopump boosts propellants from around 50 psi to 2000 psi, while pushing many gallons per second into the combustion chamber. By contrast, a Formula 1 race car fuel pump also pumps up 1000s of psi of pressure, but flows less than one gallon per minute. If you look at the cross section of a typical turbopump (for example, the F1 turbopump from the Apollo missions), you’ll see the expected impellers and turbines but will quickly get lost in a sea of complex secondary features such as slingers, balance pistons, labyrinth seals, recirculation channels, multi-stage turbines, bearing coolant systems, and so on. And even for the impellers and turbines, a 2D cross section highly simplifies them, as their sweeping, spiraling blades are one of the most 3D, organic looking features in a rocket engine.  

I can’t go into the exact details of how our turbopump design shook out, but the general idea was to not add a feature until we were convinced it was needed. Keep it as simple as possible as long as possible.  

The 1D excel code took impeller and turbine design as far as they could go on paper, spitting out speeds, inlet and outlet sizes and blade angles, and expected efficiencies. There is a big gap between the end of the equations and the gracefully shaped blades of final designs, which is spanned by specialized software.  

While on the phone with an engineer who was demoing the software we ended up purchasing, I bluntly asked “if we have a set of inlet requirements and exit requirements for an impeller, why can’t the software just give us the best answer?” Using the software required a huge amount of tweaking of parameters and manually adjusting curves until things looked just so. He answered that you don’t know exactly how a design is going to perform until you do time-intensive computational fluid dynamics modelling, so you have to design and iterate based on your experience and intuition. Ultimately, impeller and turbine design is part equation, part rule of thumb, with a sprinkling of art. Wild, for something that I had previously perceived as a triumph of engineering.  

Injector

I interspersed pump design and part procurement with work on the injector for our main chamber. Since I had significant valve design experience, we decided to go with a pintle architecture. Most engine heritage uses showerhead or impinging jet type injectors, where an array of 100s of small holes in the injector spray propellants in a way that they collide with each other and atomize into small particles that burn quickly and efficiently. These designs, however, require a network of complex passages within the injector, and precisely controlled injection hole diameters, angles, and placements. This adds up to an expensive, manufacturing-intensive process, and as far as we could tell from the resources available then, 3D printing was not an appropriate solution to make it simpler, as it could not provide the precise dimensions and surface finishes required. Pintles require none of this – they inject propellants in two “sheets,” one axial, one radial, that collide with each other to provide the atomization needed for good combustion and are designed and manufactured much more like valves than not. It also allowed us to simplify packaging and reducing the total number of parts we had to work with.  

Main Chamber

Main chamber design was another interesting exercise in theory meets reality. We narrowed our design trade space quickly by deciding we would 3D print our chamber and would do so using machines and materials that were well-distributed and understood – nothing cutting edge. This set the maximum size for our printed parts, and set our material as Inconel. Inconel is a nickel superalloy initially developed for use in jet engines. It is very strong, very heat tolerant, very weldable, and was readily available in 3D printers around the country. It is also difficult to machine and has poor thermal conductivity, two challenges we had to take on and live with.  

The crux of rocket engine combustion chambers is that the combustion inside them reaches about 6,000°F (flirting with the surface of the sun at 10,000°F), and even the best metals get quite soft at 1,200°F and melt at 2,500°F. There are a few ways to make a chamber survive this, but the most common is to run a portion of the propellants through the walls of the chamber to cool it. This sets up an interesting thermal management problem. You have to make the inner wall of the chamber as thin as possible to ensure the cooling effects of the flowing propellant can penetrate it, but not so thin that it ruptures under pressure. You have to make cooling channels in the wall narrow so the propellant flows at high velocity and cools the wall more effectively, but not so narrow that they generate excessive backpressure in the system that requires a huge amount of effort from the turbopump to overcome. You have to let the propellant suck as much heat out of the wall as possible, but not so much that it boils or breaks down.  

The combustion chamber engineer wrote a slick code that could optimize all of these parameters in a continuous sweep down the length of the combustion chamber, spitting out geometry that he could directly port over to 3D modeling software that would in turn feed the 3D printers. We made a few key assumptions and locked down a design so we could get into test and adjust, if needed. Five years later, we continue to be pleased with the outcome of this sizing. To this day we have not changed from that original chamber cooling solution. The design just works.

Build the Hardware 

One of the most energizing moments during a product development cycle is when the parts you have been designing  on a computer screen for months finally show up in person. There’s a general rule for when you first see your parts – they are either larger or smaller than you were picturing them, never exactly how you imagined. Most of our early parts were printed and machined by aerospace manufacturing shops from around the country. These shops are a special type, taking on high-value, low-quantity jobs, and delivering them rapidly to support the pace required by the industry. We had a handful of key partnerships and owe a lot to them. Seeing our early engine parts in person was awesome. First a small print of a chamber section to prove out thickness limits, then a GG, then chamber sections and injector parts. It was feeling very real. 

An outlier was the impellers and turbine for our pump. I knew they would not be the kind of parts just any machine shop would take on, and dug around and found a few that specialized in making them. When I received quotes back, it was wake up time. The impellers and the turbine were each quoted at around $18k – more than a small car! Even worse, the lead time was four months. While the cost was high, the lead time is what was ultimately untenable. We were certain to have to go through a few revisions to these designs before they were ready to fly, and adding a four month cycle to each of those revisions would drag out the overall pump development time beyond what was reasonable for a startup trying to move quickly and prove itself.  

It was time to verticalize. We leased our first 5-axis mill and hired a machinist. These parts were made from hard metals and had small intricate features. The machining wasn’t easy. I think we spent more than the outsourced quotes in broken end mills on the first set. But over time we got better, due to advances in our machining and advances in the design.  

At one point, I received a well-deserved earful from our machinist about how tightly spaced the turbine blades were. The program was taking nearly a month to run and required tiny end mills that broke often. We performed a turbine blade count study to see if we could use fewer blades with more space between them. It turned out the performance impact of running fewer blades was minimal, so we cut the number down, allowing our machinist to use larger, less fragile tools. Machine time dropped to less than a day, which was a significant win for turbine cost and machine time. It was also a good lesson in thinking comprehensively about a design’s manufacturability (those passages between the blades looked so big on the computer screen!) in addition to its performance. 

We can now produce impellers and turbines in a matter of days and at a fraction of the cost. There’s an example of the benefit of this that we reference often in tours and when recruiting engineers to our propulsion team. At one point during early pump testing, we kept running into performance issues with our fuel impeller. It wasn’t grabbing the incoming flow effectively and was giving our engine unpredictable performance. While we could combat this and work with it on the test stand, we ultimately concluded that it wasn’t going to work for flight. From the point of making that conclusion, through redesigning the impeller, getting it into the machine shop, getting it built into a pump and balanced (a step in every pump build to ensure everything spins smoothly), and getting the pump back into test to prove out the design change, it took us 10 days. If we had not brought that capability in house, we would have been stuck with either a multi month delay or with transferring the impact of this performance issue into other rocket systems or into the performance of the rocket itself. Big win.  

We’ve continued to verticalize where it has made sense. We now operate a handful of 3D printers in house, have numerous 5 axis mills and multi-axis lathes. Our turbopump rotors are balanced in house. Many of these processes or technologies seemed daunting when we first learned of them or saw them performed by another party. But once in house, you learn, you do it over and over, and it becomes routine. During my time at SpaceX we saw landing rockets go from insane to routine. The same has happened here at ABL, first for building engines and then for testing them. 

Build the Team 

Building an effective team is often more challenging than building a working engine. We’ve strived to stay as small as possible as long as possible, being very thoughtful about who we bring onboard and when. Part of ABL’s philosophy is to produce more than we consume. As we strive to do more with less, we’ve often found less enables us to do more.  

We started the propulsion program in 2018 with two engineers (myself included). We were a team of five for the first two years of development - all the way through running our first fully integrated engine. Today, it’s a team of fifteen. We’ve made hires that worked and ones that didn’t. We’ve made new grad hires and experienced hires, from inside the industry and outside. We’ve found a few traits to be key indicators of success, which are influenced by our simple engine architecture that allows first principles to prevail:   

• Engineers who don’t stay behind a desk all day, who love getting their hands on hardware, being in the field, helping with tests are almost always more effective than those who do not.  

• Where engineers bring experience, they don’t over-focus on it. They allow their experience to be a guide, a part of the puzzle, not the whole answer.  

• An engineer may own a few specific parts of an engine, of the rocket. They will be most successful if they have a comprehensive understanding and interest in how those parts fit into the bigger picture. How they effect the teams interfacing with them, the build, operation, and performance of the rocket.  

• The best engineers never sit on what they think is right, they quickly take action or they speak up regardless of org structure or seniority.  

• Overall, the best indicator of success is a strong foundation of mechanical and fluid dynamic intuition. From there, it’s easy to fill in the gaps. 

We expect a lot of each engineer and they all work incredibly hard. And because the team is small, we give each the opportunity to experience real ownership of a large part of the design, build, and test of rocket engines. 

Test and Iterate 

We started  our first E2 test campaign in summer 2019, a just under a year after we started engine design. Our first test site was on a flat concrete pad at Spaceport America in New Mexico. There we set up our first test stand which took us through pressure-fed (no turbopump, yet) testing of first our GG and then our thrust chamber. In this test campaign we accomplished a few things and learned a few things. We deployed to an austere location, we ran our first combustors, we lit with TEA-TEB (the pyrophoric liquid that is used to start many rocket and jet engines), and we worked with cryogens. We learned that snap rings don’t work well inside of combustion chambers and we learned that pintles melted easily and weren’t the slam dunk we thought they would be.  

In 2020 we deployed to site 1-56 at the Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL) near Edwards Air Force Base, where we again set up our pressure fed test stand but also a development rocket tank for pump-fed testing. Having the opportunity to operate at this site significantly accelerated our development program. At AFRL we ran our first turbopump, and it pumped! We had some challenges. We melted turbines and we had power instabilities, but we learned and adapted. Changes were made to the test stand to make the engine more controllable, changes were made to the turbine exhaust to make it more stable, and changes were made to the turbopump to make it more efficient.  

In the time between the testing at Spaceport America and AFRL we designed and manufactured a new version of our injector that didn’t use a pintle. Since we had shown we could make a chamber that worked and a GG that worked we were no longer as concerned about other injector types, and took a leap on a manufacturing method that was much less arduous than the traditional method. It wasn’t that we didn’t think we could make the pintle work eventually – I’m confident we could have – it was that we knew this other type of injector was almost certain to work right away. And it did. And we have not changed it since. 

One of the biggest accomplishments at AFRL was running a fully integrated engine, which we did on our Stage 2 development tank. We had a fully integrated engine, with a pump, GG, and TCA closing the loop and running under their own power. We were in the game.  

2021 was dedicated to building out a brand new test site in Mojave, CA and getting into testing there. As we did, we implemented a new round of upgrades to the turbopump and matured the design of everything around it on the rocket. At the end of 2021 we started the testing of engines for Flight 1, a campaign that looked dramatically different for us. We had multiple test stands, we were running many, many engines, and we were running them for full flight durations. All of a sudden our total engine run time was measured in thousands of seconds rather than tens of seconds. And they were working.

In 2022 we made thrust upgrades to the engine to give us more power. We also kicked off the build of a new engine test site, dedicated for production testing. We would soon have the ability to run engine development and production test campaigns entirely in parallel. In 2023 we repackaged the same engine components into a configuration that was more modular, making it even easier to build and test. More recently, we’ve optimized different key features of the engine, such as the TEA-TEB system to enhance reliability and long term performance.

Looking Forward 

We’ve built 50 individual engines and operated them on 6 different test stands across 3 sites. These units have racked up many hours of hotfire time and hundreds of starts. E2 iterative development is not complete, and it may never be. There will always be small improvements to manufacturing, performance, mass, or cost to make.

We’ve learned a ton and will continue to do so. Problems that seemed like existential crises at the moment look small in retrospect. You assess, you solve, you move on, you don’t make the same mistake again. We’ve had print powder in pump bearings, underperforming volutes, underperforming impellers, melting liners, melting turbines, melting manifolds, melting tubes, chugging pumps, unstable gas generators, countless leaking seals and hard starts. Each solved problem makes our engineers stronger, makes our engine stronger, makes our company stronger. 

You can only learn and solve problems like these when you test. Our biggest misses have come from not continuing to test when we didn’t absolutely have to, and pushed uncovering issues until further down the line where they were more impactful. Just like when running up a hill in a race, don’t stop and rest when you get to the top, keep the pedal down and get over the crest. 

Looking forward, we are continuing to build out our team with a blend of talented generalist engineers and propulsion engineers. It is awesome to see the assumptions and institutional knowledge we have built up over the last 6 years both leveraged and challenged. So far the results have been great, and I am excited to be a part of it.   

The first day without space technology would be a very bad day. Without GPS, the power grid would fail, financial transactions would stop, and air traffic would be grounded. Ground navigation for businesses like rideshare and food delivery would cease. We’d be blind to incoming hurricanes, ballistic missiles and other threats. U.S. and allied military forces around the world would become fragmented and unable to communicate.

As the value of space capability becomes clearer, there will be destructive forces in the world that threaten it with malicious intent. We must match these with insurmountable resiliency in our launch sites, launch vehicles and satellites. The latter two have seen real recent innovation and focus, but the launch site layer has not. Today, there are only four operational U.S. launch sites and three controlled by allies. Each site is strong, capable and operated by the world’s leading launch experts. However, the overall launch site layer represents a weak link.

This is driven by a lack of diversification in the layer. All of the sites are fixed and fixed sites are big juicy targets. They’re sprawling complexes that can be disabled in many ways. Even the most proven, high cadence launch vehicles will be grounded if launch sites are not available. With so few launch sites in the layer, it’s not hard to imagine losing 25% or even 50% of our launch capability overnight.

The Threat is Real

It could be easy to dismiss this risk as low likelihood. How realistic is it that a launch site could be disabled? The answer: it’s already happened. In just one example, the 2016 Canyon Fire stopped launch operations at Vandenberg Space Force Base for nearly two months while crews fought the fire and repaired base infrastructure.

To our knowledge, this wildfire occurred naturally, which highlights the general risk launch complexes face. But what if in the future a fire like this was set deliberately and launch vehicles had to be abandoned on the pad?

Besides arson, what if other attacks are perpetrated against our launch sites? The following scenarios are fictional, but rooted in modern threats that we face every day.

GPS Denial

A Space Force launch lifts off from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station to deliver a mission-critical space situational awareness satellite into geostationary orbit. At T+40s, the GPS sensor stops sending accurate location data to the flight computer. Inertial guidance systems attempt to hold course, but accumulated error steers the rocket off of its intended trajectory. The multi-billion dollar mission is lost. Investigations reveal that fishing vessels in the area experienced a loss of GPS around the same time as well. The launch fleet is grounded until the source of jamming can be identified.

Power Grid Sabotage

Lights flicker as the power goes out across Wallops Island. Emergency response crews converge on the main power station, where there are clear signs of sabotage. Transformers are smashed and wires are cut. The equipment damage is so extensive that it will take weeks just to get the right materials out to the site. The nearby rocket launch site is rendered inoperable.

In the Grey Zone

These type of attacks are indirect and asymmetric. Highly secure, billion dollar launch infrastructure can be impacted by vulnerabilities in completely unrelated systems. Actions can be unattributable, making it difficult to prove who was behind them. They can also be reversible. Perhaps the GPS jamming stops the next day. Because everything is in a grey-zone, formulating a response is difficult. However, the impact is certain. Without functional sites, the U.S. cannot launch satellites.

It’s a Common Threat

This threat isn’t unique to launch sites. It’s common to all critical military installations. Airbases are a close analog to launch sites. They are ground sites that enable capability aloft. If airbases are disabled, the U.S. cannot maintain air superiority, which has been proven to be a determining factor in major conflicts.

U.S. and allied defense forces have managed this threat with:

• Large Numbers: There are hundreds of military airbases around the world and thousands more civilian airports that can also be utilized.

• Diversified Architecture: Land based airports and ocean going aircraft carriers both launch planes while maintaining different threat and defense profiles. Even more sites and vessels can support aircraft with vertical take-off and landing capability.

• Expeditionary Capability: If standard sites are disabled, U.S. and allied militaries are prepared to rapidly activate new locations. Recent global exercises have demonstrated the ability to operate military jets from highways.

Another close analogy is the triad architecture of our canonical strategic capability: nuclear deterrence. A three-pronged force structure of land-based ICBMs, submarine-based SLBMs, and strategic bombers ensures survivability. Given the dependency of command and control on satellites, it’s difficult to argue that orbital launch is any less strategic.

This is a winning recipe and it can be applied similarly to satellite launch.

GS0 is the Solution

Our existing fixed launch sites represent a venerable capability. But, fixed sites alone cannot guarantee space access. They must be complemented with lightweight, low-cost, modular and deployable launch infrastructure. This technology enables us to rapidly scale the number of global launch sites, as well as field an expeditionary capability to activate launch points in non-traditional locations (ex. a parking lot, airport or barge). The hybrid architecture boasts both proliferated, difficult-to-disable launch sites and established, high throughput spaceports.

To formulate this thesis, we carefully studied the launch site layer over the last five years. We traveled to sites in Australia, the U.K., Norway and across the United States. We’ve engaged with partners in Canada, Japan, Korea, and outlying U.S. territories. We flew out to an aircraft carrier in the middle of the Pacific to observe flight operations. Our launch team practiced with Space Force personnel and with stopwatch in hand, tracking the exact time it takes to build a new orbital launch site.

The product of our work is the GS0 Launch System, which is purpose built to enable the hybrid launch site strategy that the U.S. needs to guarantee space resiliency.

GS0 is a modular orbital launch site. Commonly referred to as a launch site in a box, it has two primary components: the Launch Mount and the Site System. The former raises the RS1 launch vehicle vertical. The latter contains the fluid and electrical systems to support launch. Secondary support modules include bulk propellant tanks and mission control units.

For a 1-ton class launch vehicle such as ABL’s RS1, this degree of mobility is unique. It differs from responsive launch, which is focused on launching satellites quickly. We support that important mission too (ABL Space Force Responsive Launch). But with GS0, we’re not just launching fast. We’re building the infrastructure to ensure we always have launch sites, from which we can launch fast.

Meaningful Payload Capability

The key needs in responsive space are (A) maneuverability, which requires meaningful propulsion and propellant, and (B) access to GEO and other high-energy orbits. To achieve these, the launch solution must be capable of delivering hundreds of kilograms to Geostationary Transfer Orbit (GTO) at a minimum. RS1 was designed with this mission in mind and delivers 1,350kg to LEO and 300+ kg to GTO. Mobile launch systems with minimal launch infrastructure have been developed in the past, but at an order of magnitude smaller scale and utility.

Modular and Transportable

The foundation of GS0 is that it’s modular and transportable. The infrastructure is built in our factory, by the same team that makes RS1. This results in low-cost, high-quality systems. We’ve built three GS0 systems and each was less than 10% of the cost for a traditional fixed launch site. At this cost point, it’s feasible to have ten, twenty or even hundreds of new sites around the world.

GS0 assets pack into shipping containers to leverage the world’s extensive intermodal transport framework. They can move discreetly and deploy globally by truck, train, ship or plane. Any flat pad can become an orbital launch site in a matter of days.

Rapidly Assembled

Once on location, a small team assembles the launch site assembles in a week or less. The centerpiece Launch Mount raises RS1 vertical without a strongback to minimize the total footprint. The Launch Mount interfaces with commonly available concrete pads, such those found on runways, parking structures and rail yards.

After being placed on the pad, the Site System and bulk tanks are connected by drag-and-drop modules containing cross country lines. The systems come to life in hours, undergoing predefined health checks to validate integrity before operations begin.

Operable Off-the-Grid

All GS0 operations can be executed from generator power. To prove this capability, we deployed a GS0 system to our Mojave Test Site in 2021. Over two years, we’ve run operations every week ranging from stage tests to engine hotfires. 100% of these have been performed on generators. This demonstrated capability makes GS0 self-sufficient and resilient to local power grid disruptions.

Storable for Long Duration

GS0 and RS1 are storable. They’re designed to be boxed, shipped and stored on location until required. We’ve selected low maintenance architectures and materials to support this. For example, we use metallic structures more frequently than composites. We’ve also designed our systems with testability in mind. We can perform periodic remote health checks and quickly commission the systems when it’s time for launch.

Operable at Sea

GS0’s prowess extends beyond land and into the maritime domain. The infrastructure is provisioned to interface with commercially available ocean-going barges. Like GS0, these assets are low-cost and have a robust supply chain. Our harborside Long Beach facility includes three acres of water space, giving us a strong base for maritime development.

Barge launch creates many advantages. The architecture augments land-based sites to increase the total number of launch points. The approach also enables access to specific orbits. For example, the sea based GS0 can travel to zero-degree latitude and support equatorial missions.

Operable by U.S. Government Personnel

GS0 offers a second differentiated advantage in that the systems can be optionally operated by non-ABL personnel (ex. the U.S. Government). Satellite launch is a strategic capability, similar to operating a naval ship or flying an aircraft. To truly be resilient, in extremis, the U.S. Government needs to be self-sufficient in performing space launch.

Again, we’ve designed GS0 with this mission in mind. Over the last four years, we’ve trained with our government partners on everything from site integration to vehicle operation. In the future, we’ll work with them to execute an orbital launch.

GS0 Delivers New Capabilities

GS0’s versatility delivers resiliency to satellite launch that is on par with aircraft operations. GS0 inherently diversifies the fixed site architecture that makes up the current launch site layer. One system can support fixed launch sites, deliver sea launch, and provide expeditionary capability for extreme and unique missions.

Global Launch Network

GS0 units can be permanently installed at sites in the U.S. and allied countries. Simply increasing the number orbital launch sites inherently improves our risk profile. Certain sites can also open new and strategic orbit access.

GS0’s modularity and low-cost reduce build time and capital expense. Combined, these lower the barrier to entry for new spacefaring nations. Recent advances in U.S. Technology Safeguard Agreements (TSA) have created the regulatory framework for U.S. companies to collaborate with close U.S. allies for launch.

We are developing launch sites at Kodiak, Vandenberg, Cape Canaveral and the Shetland Islands in the U.K. We’re engaged with partners overseas to further extend our terrestrial network, and barge builds will bring sea launch to fruition. Combined, these efforts will dramatically increase the number of global allied launch points for less than the cost of one legacy fixed launch site.

Expeditionary Capability

GS0 doesn’t need to be set up permanently. It can be rapidly deployed to non-traditional locations to quickly reinforce U.S. launch capability. The modular infrastructure can be stored in hangars or warehouses. If global tensions escalate, GS0 units can be called up to quickly create an unparalleled and proliferated launch capability.

GS0’s container form factor makes it difficult to determine the exact number and location of U.S. satellite launch sites. This changes an adversary’s thought calculus to create a deterrent. If disabling the main fixed launch sites won’t ground U.S. launch vehicles, then our adversaries may be less inclined to try.

We Believe in this Mission

GS0 and RS1 deliver a unique ability: highly capable satellites can be launched to LEO, GEO or Lunar orbits from a discreet, mobile system that may be optionally operated by U.S. Government personnel. We see this capability as the missing puzzle piece to guarantee space resiliency. These same features offer protection against natural threats like solar storms, space debris, general satellite malfunctions.

A resilient launch layer is just the beginning. Our goal is to develop a broad range of products that both grow and protect our economy and national security. We believe deeply in this mission and are always looking for other partners that do too.

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Non-ABL Image Citations: A-10 Thunderbolt1, Canyon Wildfire2, F-35 Refueling3, F-35 on Runway4, Aircraft Carrier5, A-10 Thunderbolt6