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Dawn Aerospace - Aurora

Dawn Aerospace is "building an aircraft with the performance of a rocket, not a rocket with the reusability of an aircraft." Like many other companies, Dawn is taking a phased approach to starting commercial launches.

A vehicle can only be as reusable as its average failure rate permits. Winged vehicles can land without functioning engines, the most notoriously unreliable part of just about any vehicle. And redundancy can be built into other key mechanisms, such as control surfaces with little cost to performance, as is done on commercial aircraft. This makes many kinds of anomalies survivable – even significant ones - dramatically increasing the robustness of the system, even if the mission must be aborted. This is a lesson learned through the ages of aviation and comes out in the raw statistics of rocket vs. aircraft reliability where a chasm of roughly a factor of 10,000 difference exists between rocket and aircraft reliability.

Once the system is highly reusable, it can be scaled massively by operating a fleet of vehicles, like commercial airlines. Dawn believes this will also bring down the cost of operation through economies of scale and hardware cost amortisation with thousands of flights in a vehicle’s lifetime.

The key to any environmental impact assessment is considering total lifecycle emissions, from beginning manufacture to retirement. Most of a launch vehicle’s carbon footprint is due to the manufacturing of the vehicle, not the burning of hydrocarbons during launch. Fleet economics will reduce the carbon emission due to manufacturing by the same factor that can reuse the vehicle. Dawn anticipates achieving between 100 and 1000 flights per vehicle, which would mean a 99-99.9% reduction in emissions due to manufacturing. Most aircraft are used tens of thousands of times, so Dawn felt this was a reasonable goal. The remaining carbon footprint is in the fuels. Once again, we draw on the airline industry for ongoing developments in sustainable aviation fuels, which would also apply well to the fuels in current use. Through reusable vehicles and carbon-neutral fuels, there is a clear path to a dramatically more sustainable space launch industry.

There are literally hundreds of airports worldwide that meet the basic needs of length and width to satisfy the Mk-III design, each of which could support dozens of flights a day. There would be no need to build dedicated runway infrastructure, Building new launch facilities, while solvable, is certainly non-trivial with lead times, extreme cost and environmental impact of their own.

Dawn Aerospace, operating in the US, New Zealand and the Netherlands, successfully tested a prototype spaceplane in April 2023. This is not Dawn's first success, as the company already has 15 different satellites in orbit. It's not even the first successful test of a space plane - the company has already done some tests using jet engines. However, this is the first time the company has successfully tested a rocket-powered aircraft.

A series of three tests took place in late March at Glentanner Airfield in New Zealand, where the aircraft successfully fired its rocket engine. A speed of more than 320 km/h and an altitude of 2 kilometers above sea level may seem insignificant, but this is the first step for this technology.

The Mk II is a drone that has a lot of advantages, mainly due to the reduced physical weight of the project and the testing required to certify the device for crewed flights. Unfortunately, this also means that Dawn will only be able to launch payloads and not get people into orbit, at least in its current form.

Designed for aircraft-like operations, but with the performance of a rocket, it uses aircraft-friendly, storable propellants for gas-and-go operations. With mono and bi-propellant modes of operation, it’s highly throttleable and restartable. A combination of high-test peroxide (HTP) and kerosene provides both high specific impulse and high-density impulse, important for packing a lot of propellant into a small, aerodynamic airframe. Room temperature storable propellants will not boil off, and carbon fiber will not suffer from microcracking, as is common in cryogenic composite tanks. This enables flexible aircraft operations and near-infinite service life, just as you would expect with any other aircraft.

The Mk-II is a demonstrator, but once Dawn had proven it works, it will be one of the most capable vehicles ever built, even if it only has a modest payload of 5 kg to 100 km (more to lower altitudes). We anticipate many applications in Earth observation, atmospheric research, climate monitoring, communications, microgravity research, and many more. This will be a totally unique capability, so the market is somewhat unknown.

These tests represent the start of work on the Mk II Aurora, which will eventually be able to fly to an altitude of up to 100 km to deliver a payload, then return to its runway and repeat the process on the same day. The Mk II hopes to be the first vehicle to do this.

The Mk-II Aurora is Dawn's first entry into the suborbital frontier and the first-stage demonstrator for the two-stage-to-orbit vehicle. The commercial version of this remotely-piloted, reusable rocket plane is designed to fly multiple times a day from a runway. The Mk-II will take off horizontally, fly a parabolic trajectory at Mach 3+, and glide back to a horizontal landing at the originating site or downrange. The vehicle’s 3U volume can contain and expose payloads in the upper atmosphere. It is a flexible platform with various mission possibilities, including aeronomy, earth observation, education, in-space science, space weather, and technology development.

The Mk-II is the first in a series of vehicles that will merge the world of rockets and aviation to access space in a new way. The next big step will be getting to the performance limits of this first airframe. This airframe was built to be extremely hard-wearing and reconfigurable from jets to rocket power. It has undergone many small repairs and unplanned modifications, which all add weight. Naturally, it is not as high-performance as an optimized vehicle could be.

Dawn anticipated that this first version, the "Mk-IIA," will reach a maximum altitude of 60kft (20 km) as it has limited propellant capacity. The Mk-IIB will be a highly optimized version, using the same aerodynamic shape and basic architecture but pushing every parameter to achieve maximum performance. Upgrades will include wing box tanks to increase propellant storage, a higher thrust engine, a lighter structure, and an RCS system. The Mk-IIB will be capable of flying supersonic, outside of the atmosphere, and eventually, to over 100 km altitude. Each of these achievements will be a milestone on the path to demonstrating rapidly reusable and scalable space transportation.

On the other hand, the Mk III will include a reusable second stage that will help lift payloads of up to a ton into suborbital flight and 250kg into orbit. The aircraft-based first stage will again be reusable, but the second stage will be lost.

If this business model sounds suspiciously similar to the recently bankrupt Virgin Orbit, that's because it is. Using an aircraft (which in the case of Virgin Orbit was air-launched) to deliver a relatively small payload into orbit has been a common goal of several companies that have tried to make access to space cheaper by making the vehicles that go there reusable. In this case, Dawn succeeded where Virgin Orbit failed.

The mission still has a lot of testing and development to go through before it can reach the Mk II or III milestone, but this first test is a step in the right direction. And thanks to this success, New Zealand appears to be climbing the list of the world's most important powers in the race to lower the cost of space access.