Tag: Ursa Major

Ursa Major raises $138 million in private investment capital

9:30 am

The rocket engine startup Ursa Major has successfully raised an additional $138 million in private investment capital in an extended round of fund-raising.

Rocket propulsion startup Ursa Major announced Nov. 30 it has raised $138 million in Series D and D-1 funding rounds. Investors include Explorer 1 Fund and Eclipse, RTX Ventures, funds and accounts managed by BlackRock, Exor Ventures, Mack & Co., XN and other institutional shareholders.

Based in Berthoud, Colorado, Ursa Major manufactures liquid engines for small space launchers and hypersonic vehicles, and recently announced plans to expand into solid rocket motors. An initial Series D round was completed earlier this year. But Ursa Major said it extended fundraising to include a Series D-1 round “due to strong interest in accelerating development on several future programs.”

The company’s decision to enter the solid rocket motor market was apparently greeted with enthusiasm by investors. The biggest user of these motors is the U.S. military, and it desperately needs more provides to refresh its stockpile, since so much of that stockpile has been shipped to the Ukraine.

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Rocket engine startup Ursa Major enters solid-rocket motor business

10:08 am

Recognizing a desperate need of the military to ramp up production of solid rocket motors after much of its missile stockpile has been depleted by President Biden’s large gifts to the Ukraine, the rocket engine startup Ursa Major has now announced it is entering solid-rocket motor business.

Describing the solid rocket motor [SRM] market as “plagued by a broken supply chain and an overextended industrial base,” the Colorado startup today announced its plans to use its 3D printing techniques developed for liquid rocket engines to speed production of solid-fuel propulsion systems. Ursa Major has received several contracts from the Air Force Research Laboratory for its work on a new rocket engine for heavy space launch vehicles, as well as a hypersonic engine.

“Traditional SRM providers rely on production lines that are difficult to re-tool, expensive to ramp up, and dependent on a significant workforce to operate,” the company said in a press release touting its “new approach” to manufacturing, dubbed Lynx. “Ursa Major is offering a new way to scale production of SRMs,” Ursa Major CEO Joe Laurienti said in the press release. “Lynx meets the defense industry’s need for a faster, cheaper, scalable, and flexible SRM production process that results in better-performing solid rocket motors.”

The article also notes that at present the military is dependent on only two companies for new solid rockets, Northrop Grumman and Aerojet Rocketdyne (now L3Harris). The article also notes that it could take anywhere from five to eighteen years for these companies to replenish the depleted stocks.

The bottleneck however has brought several new players into the field, with the military eager to issue contracts to these new players. This decision by Ursa Major is thus a very good one.

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Air Force awards Ursa Major rocket engine development contact

9:13 am

The Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL) has awarded the rocket engine startup Ursa Major a contract to develop two different rocket engines.

Under the contract, the Colorado-based firm will build and test a prototype of its new Draper engine for hypersonics, and further develop its 200,000-pound thrust Arroway engine for space launch.

…Under the AFRL contract, for which neither the lab or company provided a value, Ursa Major will also build a dedicated test stand for Draper and plans to hotfire the engine within 12 months.

Arroway, on the other hand, is a reusable liquid oxygen and methane staged combustion engine for medium and heavy launch vehicles. Ursa Major first announced development the 200,000-pound thrust engine last August, explaining that when clustered together, Arroway engines could replace the Russian-made RD-180 and RD-181, which are no longer available to US launch firms.

According to Ursa Major’s press release, the AFRL contract will allow further development of Arroway with a hotfire expected in 2025.

Ursa Major already has several contracts for its smaller Hadley engine, from the rocket startups Phantom, Vector, Astra, and the Air Force, and has built more than a hundred so far. The Arroway meanwhile is being developed as an American replacement for the Russian engines used by Northrop Grumman in its Antares rocket.

All in all, it appears Ursa Major is becoming a major challenger to Aerojet Rocketdyne, which in recent years had a lock on most government contracts for rocket engines. That lock resulted in very expensive engines that took years to build. The government (and others) are now finding someone else to provide this service at a better cost and far more quickly. We shall see whether Aerojet Rocketdyne responds to this competition properly, or goes the way of the horse carriage.

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Rocket engine company Ursa Major raises $100 million in private investment capital

9:06 am

The American rocket engine company Ursa Major recently raised an additional $100 million in private investment capital, on top of the $85 million it raised last year.

All told, the company has raised $234 million. Its Hadley engine presently has contracts with rocket startups Astra and Phantom, the hypersonic missile testing company Stratolaunch, and the Air Force. It is also developing two larger engines, the Ripley and the Arroway, the latter designed to replace Russian engines previously used by American companies.

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Astra confirms it is buying Ursa Major rocket engines for its Rocket-4 upper stage

9:55 am

Astra yesterday confirmed that it will be buying Ursa Major’s Hadley rocket engine for the upper stage of its Rocket-4, now tentatively scheduled for a first test launch later this year.

Astra has been tight-lipped about the new upper stage engine that would power its new Rocket 4, with CEO Chris Kemp only telling investors last year that the rocket’s substantially increased payload capacity was thanks in part to engine upgrades. Outsourcing the engine helps clarify how Astra was able to so quickly pivot its plans for Rocket 4, including doubling the launch vehicle’s payload capacity from 300 kilograms to 600 kilograms.

Ursa Major has already sold engines to several rocket companies and the government, including Phantom, Vector, Stratolaunch, and the Air Force. It is also building two different larger engines, Ripley and Arroway, with the latter aimed at replacing the engines Russia provided to ULA and Northrop Grumman.

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Ursa Major makes rocket engine deal with Air Force

10:16 am

Capitalism in space: Ursa Major announced today that the Air Force has awarded it a contract to test and qualify its Hadley rocket engines for future military space missions.

Ursa Major will also be providing the Air Force Research Lab with statistically significant data sets from extensive testing of multiple Hadley engines, including measurements of specific impulse, or ISP, combustion stability, vibration and shock profiles, and range of inlet pressures and temperatures.

Hadley will be qualified using similar metrics according to an internal test plan based on industry guidelines and best practices, focusing on engine life, operating space, functional requirements, and performance. The qualification test campaign under this effort will include runtime at and beyond the extremes of the power level and mixture ratio targets, demonstrating that Hadley operates safely and reliably within the power level and mixture ratio required for missions of DOD interest.

Ursa Major was founded by the engineers who developed SpaceX’s Merlin engine. It has already won a number of rocket engine contracts, including an order for 200 Hadley engines from rocket startup Phantom Space., and a contract with Northrop Grumman to replace the Russian-built engines on its Antares rocket with Ursa Major’s larger Arroway engine. [Ed: Ursa Major doesn’t have this contract, Firefly does. Ursa Major’s Arroway is simply comparable and competitive for the same business.]

Getting the Hadley engine certified by the Air Force will instantly make this engine more appealing to numerous rocket companies. In fact, it will make Ursa Major as a company more appealing. If this certification moves forward quickly, expect the Air Force to follow with a certification program for the larger Arroway engine. And if that occurs this engine might supplant other engines produced by Aerojet Rocketdyne and Blue Origin, especially because it appears that Ursa Major is using the same manufacturing philosophies of SpaceX, focusing not so much on design as assembly-line manufacturing, as shown by its 200 engine contract with Phantom.

Thus, it appears focused on producing many engines at less cost, and quickly.

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Ursa Major announces new rocket engine to replace what Russia previously provided

9:32 am

Capitalism in space: The new rocket engine company Ursa Major yesterday announced a new more powerful rocket engine, dubbed Arroway, designed to replace rocket engines that Russia had been selling.

Arroway is a 200,000-pound thrust liquid oxygen and methane staged combustion engine that will serve markets including current U.S. national security missions, commercial satellite launches, orbital space stations, and future missions not yet conceived. The reusable Arroway engine is available for order now, slated for initial hot-fire testing in 2023, and delivery in 2025.

Notably, Arroway engines will be one of very few commercially available engines that, when clustered together, can displace the Russian-made RD-180 and RD-181, which are no longer available to U.S. launch companies.

Arroway could replace the RD-181 engines that Northrop Grumman uses on the first stage of its Antares rocket. Both engines are comparable in size. However, with Arroway available no sooner than ’25 it still will leave a gap, since right now the company only has enough stock on hand to launch two more rockets, both of which should launch before ’24.

Arroway is also about half as powerful as Blue Origin’s BE-4 engine, so if ULA wishes to use it in its Vulcan rocket a major redesign would be required.

Either way, Ursa Major is demonstrating here again the value of freedom and competition, as well as the foolishness and negative consequences of Russia’s invasion of the Ukraine. In response to the international sanctions against it, Russia blocked future rocket engine sales to the U.S. Not only did that not get the sanctions lifted, Russia is now losing that U.S. business, as other American companies are stepping up to replace it.

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Phantom Space orders more than 200 rocket engines from Ursa Major

9:58 am

Hadley engine from Ursa Major

Capitalism in space: The smallsat startup rocket company Phantom Space today announced it has ordered more than 200 rocket engines from the rocket engine company Ursa Major.

The order includes Ursa Major’s 5,000-Pound Thrust Hadley engines and the new 50,000-pound thrust Ripley engines. By using Ursa Major’s Hadley engines, Phantom’s Daytona rocket is slated for orbital launch in 2023, just three years after Phantom Space was formed. Under the terms of the agreement, Ursa Major will supply hundreds of its Hadley engines in different configurations including ground test and upper-stage vacuum variants, as well as numerous Ripley engines for planned upgrades to the Daytona vehicle.

The CEO of Phantom Space, Jim Cantrell, gave me a tour of its facility here in Tucson only three weeks ago, during which I took the picture above of a Hadley engine being tested and prepared for further static fire tests.

Cantrell had been the founder of Vector, his earlier failed attempt to create a smallsat rocket company. He clearly has not let that failure stop him.

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A tour at rocket startup Phantom Space

2:45 pm

Jim Cantrell at Phantom

Creating a new rocket company is not something anyone can do. Nor is it something that even smart people can do, nonchalantly. The history of rocketry is littered with hundreds of attempts, almost all of which failed.

Jim Cantrell, pictured on the right standing next to one of the first test prototypes for a new rocket being made by his new company, Phantom Space, is one such person. In the mid-2010s Cantrell partnered with a number of others to found the company Vector, hoping to be one of the first smallsat rocket companies to launch a cheap and efficient rocket placing tiny satellites into orbit. At the time, Cantrell and Vector were racing neck and neck with Rocket Lab for the honor of being the first to do so.

While Rocket Lab succeeded in 2018, and has since completed more than twenty launches, Vector ended up on the ash heap of history, going bankrupt in 2019. The company’s failure was mostly due to problems with its rocket engine, which in turn caused one of its major investors to back out.

Cantrell however is apparently someone who does not take defeat quietly. Using what he had learned at Vector, in 2021 he started a new rocket company, Phantom Space, with a target date for its first test launch the summer of 2023.

Today Cantrell gave me a quick tour of Phantom’s operations here in Tucson.
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Arianespace and SpaceX adjust to the new commercial launch market, without Russia

9:56 am

Link here. The article is mostly about how both companies need to adjust their launch schedules, with Arianespace scrambling to find rockets for its customers who had been scheduled to launch on Russian Soyuz-2 rockets and SpaceX describing how it will readjust its schedule with the addition of the OneWeb satellite launches.

The article had two quotes of interest. First, this fact about Arianespace’s new Vega-C rocket:

The Vega C uses an upper stage engine provided by Ukraine’s Yuzhmash, and supplies of that engine are in question because of the ongoing invasion. ESA officials said March 17 that they have three of those engines, enough to handle the anticipated Vega C missions this year.

ESA is supporting work on a new upper stage engine, M10, for a version of the Vega called Vega E that is slated to make its first launch around 2025. [Stéphane Israël, chief executive of Arianespace] said there was “no need” to accelerate work on Vega E, though, citing the Ukrainian engines in storage.

Thus, Vega-C is in the same boat as Northrop Grumman’s Antares, which also relies on Ukrainian rocket engines. When you also add the difficulty that both Blue Origin and ULA are having getting new rockets off the ground because of the delays in the BE-4 engine, it appears that in general there is presently a strong need across the entire rocket industry for rocket engines that is not being fulfilled by the engine builders available. This fact puts the new rocket engine company Ursa Major in a very strong position, should it begin to build bigger engines to serve this need. It also suggests there is an opportunity here for other engine builders, such as Aerojet Rocketdyne, if they have the wherewithal to grab it.

The second quote from the article of interest was from a SpaceX official, describing how the company is dealing with the sudden requirement to launch 216 OneWeb satellites:

Tom Ochinero, vice president of commercial sales at SpaceX, said at the conference that the company’s vertical integration and large fleet of reusable boosters offer the company flexibility to accommodate customers like OneWeb. “We can react very quickly because we’re just managing a fleet,” he said. [emphasis mine]

I just love the significance of the highlighted quote. Unlike all past rocket companies, SpaceX doesn’t have to build more rockets to add new customers, which makes adding new customers difficult and expensive. It simply can readjust how it uses the rockets in its fleet to get those new customers in orbit. And the new business will likely pay for SpaceX to expand that fleet so that it can launch more satellites even quicker.

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Startup rocket company begins delivering engines

9:55 am

Capitalism in space: The startup rocket company, Ursa Major, announced today that it has completed qualification tests of its new Hadley rocket engine and has begun delivering flight worthy engines to two different companies.

Startup Ursa Major announced Wednesday that it had completed qualification of its Hadley rocket engine for use by both a space launch vehicle and a hypersonic launch system. The Colorado-based company said it has already started delivering flight-ready Hadley engines to two customers, Phantom Space and Stratolaunch, and plans to produce a total of 30 engines this year.

The engine is relatively small compared to most rocket engines. Phantom will use seven in the first stage of its smallsat Daytona rocket, designed to launch cubesats into orbit. What Stratolaunch will use the engine for is unclear.

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Rocket engine startup Ursa Major Technologies

9:47 am

Capitalism in space: While there appear to presently be about 100+ new rocket company startups competing to garner market share in the growing satellite launch industry, it appears there is only one startup, Ursa Major Technologies, focused solely on building rocket engines for those rockets.

The company’s business model is based on the idea that while many launch providers make their own propulsion systems, others will choose outsourcing so they don’t have to invest money and time in risky engine development.

It presently has a small engine, dubbed Hadley, that is set to launch on another company’s rocket in ’22, and a larger engine, dubbed Ripley, that is being developed and has a contract for use by the new rocket startup Phantom Space.

In a sense this company is conceivable in competition with Momentus, which builds and sells a space tug, essentially an upper stage engine, for moving smallsats from one orbit to another. Both are aiming for a niche within the new smallsat industry by providing rockets and satellites engines.

If the industry grows as big as hoped, both will likely have plenty of business.

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Company aims to sell its rocket engines to smallsat rocket companies

10:13 am

Capitalism in space: The new rocket engine manufacturer Ursa Major is aiming to sell its rocket engines to the new wave of smallsat rocket companies now emerging.

Ursa Major has taken up the challenge of trying to convince launch startups to outsource their engines rather than follow the models of SpaceX and Blue Origin. “The first gut response is ‘our engines are special and we don’t have a company without our engines,’ but if there is a way to increase their margin by flying someone else’s engines, most companies will be interested in coming around,” Ursa Major founder and CEO Joe Laurienti says.

Rocket Lab, Virgin Orbit and Vector Space Systems — three frontrunners fielding dedicated smallsat launchers — are building engines in house. Currently, just two launch startups — Generation Orbit and ABL Space Systems — have gone public with plans to depend on Laurienti’s 26-person team in Berthoud, Colorado, to supply the engines for the satellite launchers they’re developing.

That we now have companies that have successfully raised investment capital for both building rocket engines in-house for their own rockets as well buying them from independent subcontractors is firm proof that the upcoming boom in smallsat rockets is real, and very robust. The 20s should be a very exciting decade for rocketry.

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