LEAP 71 hot-fires 3D printed Aerospike rocket engine
The engine was designed by the company's Noyron computational AI model
LEAP 71, a computational engineering company, has successfully hot-fired one of the most advanced rocket engines ever created – an Aerospike with 5,000 Newtons (1,100 lbf) of thrust, powered by cryogenic liquid oxygen and kerosene. The engine was generated autonomously by the latest generation of Noyron, the company’s large computational engineering model.
The success places LEAP 71 among an elite group of teams that have mastered the challenges of the unique Aerospike engine design. By leveraging the power of Noyron’s computational AI, the thruster was developed in a matter of weeks, manufactured as a monolithic piece of copper through industrial 3D printing, and put to the test – where it worked successfully on the first attempt.
“We were able to extend Noyron’s physics to deal with the unique complexity of this engine type. The spike is cooled by intricate cooling channels flooded by cryogenic oxygen, whereas the outside of the chamber is cooled by the kerosene fuel. I am very encouraged by the results of this test, as virtually everything on the engine was novel and untested. It’s a great validation of our physics-driven approach to computational AI,” said Josefine Lissner, CEO and Co-founder of LEAP 71.
“Despite their clear advantages, Aerospikes are not used in space access today. We want to change that. Noyron allows us to radically cut the time we need to re-engineer and iterate after a test and enables us to converge rapidly on an optimal design,” said Lin Kayser, Co-founder of LEAP 71.
The Aerospike was printed using a Laser Powder Bed Fusion process by industrial partner Aconity3D, with an advanced aerospace copper alloy (CuCrZr). After it was cleaned of excess copper powder by Solukon, it underwent heat treatment at the Fraunhofer Institute for Laser Technology. The University of Sheffield’s Race 2 Space Team prepared the engine for the test site and provided active support during the campaign.
The Aerospike was fired on December 18th, 2024, as part of a four-engines-in-four-days campaign conducted by LEAP 71 at Airborne Engineering in Westcott, UK. The company will process the collected data to fine-tune Noyron for the next iteration of engines and continue testing in 2025, with the goal of making Aerospikes a viable option for modern spacecraft.
