Stefan Powell , CEO

I am stoked to share with you a significant milestone in our journey toward revolutionizing space transportation. Last week, our team successfully conducted three rocket-powered flights of the Mk-II Aurora. This is a phenomenal achievement for our small, but extremely capable, team in New Zealand and the Netherlands. To my knowledge, Dawn now operates the most rapidly reusable rocket-powered aircraft in the world – although if you can think of another, please drop a comment on this post.

I wanted to share some of our thoughts on why we built the Mk-II the way we did and where we are going.

Our mission

Dawn's mission is to provide scalable and sustainable space transportation - both from Earth to space and from space to everywhere else. It is important to consider both aspects, as doing so allows us to develop globally optimized solutions to the entire transportation challenge - from launching off Earth's surface through to controlled deorbit at the end of a satellite's life.

To address the “from space to everywhere else” part of our mission, we already have a well-established business supplying in-space propulsion to satellite builders all over the world. We were the first to demonstrate nitrous bi-propellant propulsion in space, and now are the leading suppliers worldwide of green propulsion with over 50 thrusters in orbit and hundreds more on order. We feel we are well on the way to achieving this part of our mission, and the path forward is clear.

Our space launch program recognises the importance of the most energy-intensive part of space transportation – getting to space is the first place. The key challenges here are clearly cost, reliability and capacity, all of which are highly interrelated. Here is how we thought about these challenges and why we chose a spaceplane to solve them.

Why a spaceplane?

To achieve a highly scalable service to space, you must cross some basic bridges first. The vehicle must first address;

• reliability and robustness;

• reusability; and

• scalability – specifically, how widely the service can be rolled out —

in that order.

When we set out to change how we access space, we didn’t want an iterative step on expendable rockets—there are plenty of others doing that well. We want a genuine revolution.

We can see many others adapting these rockets to be more reusable. But, from our own experience, we knew there were some baked-in fundamentals that we would always be battling against. The concept has many single points of failure and generally struggles to address a fundamental need for robustness to survive inevitable malfunctions we see in complex vehicles. 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. We wanted to lean in on these facts to bring aircraft reliability to spaceflight.  

The aircraft concept gives us that robustness. From there, all systems are designed to be long life, highly serviceable, based on storable propellants, and certifying as an aircraft (at least in New Zealand, we acknowledge a different approach may be needed in other jurisdictions), giving us flexible operations and rapid reusability.

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

Sustainability is important to us. Beyond being the responsible thing to do, there is no point in building something if we aren’t going to be able to use it. 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 we can reuse the vehicle.  We anticipate 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 we feel this is a reasonable goal. The remaining carbon footprint is in the fuels we burn. Once again, we draw on the airline industry for ongoing developments in sustainable aviation fuels, which would also apply well to the fuels we currently use. Through reusable vehicles and carbon-neutral fuels, there is a clear path to a dramatically more sustainable space launch industry.

Even if much of the above was solved in other ways, and we had expendable or refurbishable rockets in abundance and at low cost, we would struggle to launch them at the cadence needed. We are already getting close to the maximum launch capacity of key space centres such as Kennedy. Building new launch facilities, while solvable, is certainly non-trivial with lead times, extreme cost and environmental impact of their own. In contrast, while you would not want to fly a spaceplane out of busy urban airports such as LAX, 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, even in our wildest dreams of hundreds of spaceplanes in daily operation.

“An aircraft with the performance of a rocket” – not the other way around

From the early decision that the aircraft model was one we wanted to follow, the mantra has always been, “We are building an aircraft with the performance of a rocket,” - not a rocket with the reusability of an aircraft. The difference is key.

We have demonstrated robustness and have a snapshot into what rapid reusability will look like from the previous 50 flights, three of which were rocket-powered. We demonstrated 3 tests in the first three days of rocket-powered flight, so multiple flights a day or more is most certainly feasible.

We still have a long way to go before we have the performance to get to space twice in a day, but we have a strong conviction that we are on the right track.

Commercial implications

The Mk-II is a demonstrator, but once we have 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. Early indications are that we would have unrivalled capacity to explore parts of the atmosphere so poorly understood they are known in climate monitoring circles as "the ignorosphere" (ask GPT for an explanation). We are excited to see where these applications lead.

Our road to space

The Mk-II is just the start. We are under no illusion that there is a long way to go before these vehicles reach space, let alone getting a second stage to orbit. We have flown it now for the first time under rocket power. 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. We anticipate that this first version, one we have come to call 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.

It has taken us time to get here. We are ok with that because we believe we are on a path to completely upend the economic model of space launch and potentially create new business models for suborbital and other markets along the way. We are not just building a slightly cheaper rocket. In the meantime, we have a viable business in space propulsion which gives us a solid foundation as a company.

Once the Mk-II mission - to be the first vehicle to fly to space twice in one day - is complete, we will have the skill, team, and confidence to invest in the next step: the full-scale Mk-III vehicle, capable of deploying an expendable second stage which delivers a 250 kg satellite to orbit. We will also be in a prime position to commercialize the Mk-II capability, something we are already fielding much interest in.

Lastly, I want to say a heartfelt thanks to the team in NZ, NL, and the USA. I am ever encouraged by the way in which we share in each other's passion for improving the status quo. It is not easy, but you all show up every day to make the difference, whatever your role may be.

As well, a big thanks to all our investors, supporters, collaborators, and especially the CAA and NZSA, who innovate along with us to push the boundaries of aerospace.

The path ahead is equal parts exciting and challenging. I look forward to it all,

—Stefan Powell