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Engineers at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, conduct a successful, 251-second hot fire test of a full-scale Rotating Detonation Rocket Engine combustor in fall 2023, achieving more than 5,800 pounds of thrust. - NASA NASA has achieved a new benchmark in developing an innovative propulsion system called the Rotating Detonation Rocket Engine (RDRE). Engineers at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, successfully tested a novel, 3D-printed RDRE for 251 seconds (or longer than four minutes), producing more than 5,800 pounds of thrust. That kind of sustained burn emulates typical requirements for a lander touchdown or...

A Florida team working with the US Air Force claims that it's built and tested an experimental model of a rotating detonation rocket engine, which uses spinning explosions inside a ring channel to create super-efficient thrust. While space propulsion is the key driver for this research, it also has potential terrestrial uses in other cases where high power and low fuel consumption could make a big difference. In 2012, the Naval Research Laboratory estimated that rotating detonation engines could save the Navy 15-20 percent off a ~US$2-billion annual fuel bill if they were retrofitted in place of the gas turbine...

The Pegasus team from the Aris student space initiative has generated a stable detonation wave with its engine. Robin Wyss / Aris Space ========================================================================= Students in Switzerland have recently tested an experimental rocket engine that is capable of generating 20,000 detonation waves per second, the same propulsion concept explored by NASA and Japanese researchers for future space missions. The so-called rotating detonation rocket engine (RDRE) is powered by propane and liquid oxygen. It was built by the Pegasus team, a student project within the ARIS (Academic Space Initiative Switzerland) at ETH Zurich. The third-year students spent nearly a year developing...

NASA completed a round of testing last year with the "rotating detonation rocket engine," which generates thrust using fuel-saving supersonic combustion, agency officials wrote(opens in new tab) in an update on Wednesday (Jan. 25). Those tests were very early-stage, but agency officials say that future iterations of the technology could be used on moon or Mars missions, for robotic probes or crewed landers. Expanding humanity's footprint across the solar system will require a fundamental rethink of how we approach long-distance travel, with both fuel and time, exploration advocates say. Getting to Mars with current propulsion technology takes six to nine...

The Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) has announced that it has successfully demonstrated the operation of a “rotating detonation engine” for the first time in space. The novelty of the technologies in question is that such systems obtain a large amount of thrust by using much less fuel compared to conventional rocket engines, which is quite advantageous for space exploration. On July 27, the Japanese agency launched a pair of futuristic propulsion systems into space to carry out the first tests. They were launched from the Uchinoura Space Center aboard the S-520-31, a single-stage rocket capable of lofting a 220...