A ground test fire of the Draper engine. (Ursa Major photo)
WASHINGTON — Following an award from the Air Force Research Laboratory, rocket startup Ursa Major plans to take its new Draper engine to flight, which the company says can pave the way to a new generation of liquid fuel-based hypersonic propulsion for defense and commercial applications.
The $28.6 million AFRL award issued today will mature the Draper engine and fund its maiden flight test, which Ursa Major CEO Dan Jablonsky told Breaking Defense is on track to take place by the end of this year.
“This will be a next generation capability being introduced by Ursa Major for hypersonic technology,” Jablonsky said in an interview ahead of the contract award. “This will be a storable liquid rocket engine capable of hypersonic speeds in atmosphere or exoatmospheric, and nothing else like it exists on that basis.”
The flight test is a demonstration meant to show the engine actually works and is hypersonic-capable. It won’t fly hypersonically at first for that reason, but subsequent configurations will aim to achieve speeds greater than Mach 5.
“What we’ll prove is that we can throttle it, we turn it on, we turn it off,” Jablonsky said, ensuring that the engine “flies in a configuration with the right performance characteristics.” Ursa Major will serve as the integrator for the vehicle used for the flight, Jablonsky added, though he did not name the platform. He declined to identify Draper’s price, but said it is “much more efficient and cheaper than current systems, and sometimes by an order of magnitude.”
Rockets come in two different types, either solid or liquid. Solid rockets consist of a pre-mixed propellant and oxidizer to enable combustion, but cannot be controlled (or “throttled”) once ignited. Liquid rockets use separate liquid fuel and oxidizer that are combined and burned in a combustion chamber, enabling a rocket to be throttled as a result. Liquid rocket fuel is also more hazardous to store than its solid counterpart and must be kept at cryogenic temperatures, but tends to have better performance.
Ursa Major is aiming to close the gap between solid and liquid rockets through the Draper, providing the tactical storage capabilities typical for a solid rocket motor and the throttle and greater ranges offered by a liquid, with a key enabling feature being a storable combination of hydrogen peroxide and kerosene as propellant. Draper itself was developed with a mix of Air Force and internal funding and is based on the company’s Hadley engine, which has flown three times, according to Jablonsky.
Jablonsky said over 80 percent of the engine is 3D printed and comes with a modular design. With 4,000 pounds of thrust, the Draper will initially be a hypersonic missile configuration, which Jablonsky said could be sea-, land- or air-launched and even stored in space for several years in a space-based interceptor — a callout to President Donald Trump’s “Golden Dome” initiative. Ursa Major is targeting the commercial market as well, Jablonsky said, pointing to applications like space mobility.
Ursa Major hopes if the technology is successful, it could be incorporated into existing products or new ones. “The volumetric envelope of this thing is fantastic,” Jabonskly said. “So it fits inside a lot of different systems that are already in existence, or systems that are being designed.”
