00:00Pittsburgh-based company Astrobotic just cleared a big hurdle toward flying a brand new kind
00:05of rocket engine. The company just successfully tested its experimental Rotating Detonation
00:10Rocket Engine, or RDRE, it's named Chakram. They just completed a series of hot fire tests
00:15with it at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center.
00:18What makes this engine different is not only how it works, but also how it looks. RDREs
00:22don't have the same expanding bell shape we're used to seeing on rocket engines. Instead,
00:27a pointed aerospike nozzle helps propagate waves from a set of circulating detonations
00:31inside a ringed chamber, chasing each other at supersonic speeds. That process creates
00:37higher pressure and more efficiency, meaning more thrust with less fuel, and is expected
00:41to improve performance by up to 15% compared to the rocket engines we use today.
00:46Hot fire tests happen on the ground, where the engine is ignited and run to qualify it
00:50to operate safely in actual flight conditions. In these latest tests, Astrobotic ran two of
00:56its RDRE prototypes for a combined 470 seconds, including a 300 second continuous burn, which
01:02the company thinks is the longest sustained RDRE firing ever.
01:06It starts to answer one of the biggest questions around these types of engines. Can they actually
01:10run long enough to be useful on a real spacecraft? Astrobotic says yes, or at least it's getting
01:16there. The company is already looking at using Chakram on future lunar landers, orbital transfer
01:21vehicles and other spacecraft operating in cislunar space. And Astrobotic isn't alone. Companies
01:26like Venus Aerospace have already flown similar engines, signaling that this long theoretical
01:30technology is finally nearing reality.
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