AIR TURBO ROCKET

The Air Turbo Rocket is a propulsion system that combines concepts from turbojets and rocket motors to enable operation from takeoff to high supersonic/low hypersonic flight speeds. The engine has two notable performance characteristics across its operating range of standstill to Mach 5:

1. High Fuel Economy (or “Specific Impulse”) - The ATR has a propellant consumption rate about 25% that of a rocket of similar thrust.

2. High Thrust - The ATR has about 2x the thrust of an afterburning turbojet of similar size.

This combination of high fuel economy and high thrust during a significant portion of the acceleration of the Space Plane to orbital velocity enables the vehicle to i) reach orbital speeds without staging and ii) incorporate features such as wings and landing gear that allow for aircraft-like logistic simplicity.

Based on these benefits, the ATRX Space Plane is projected to have lower operating costs than launch systems that exclusively use rocket propulsion and require staging to reach orbit.

The video below shows a test firing of ATRX’s Air Turbo Rocket prototype. Although the engine used oxygen and hydrogen as propellants in this test, the ATR can use a wide variety of other propellant combinations such as LOx/RP-1 and LOx/Methane.