Stoke Space test-fires new booster engine
Stoke Space has test-fired a highly efficient engine it is developing for the first stage of its fully reusable launch vehicle.
The company, based in Kent, Washington, announced June 11 that it performed a brief firing of the engine at a test site in Moses Lake, Washington, on June 5. The engine, designed to produce up to 100,000 pounds-force of thrust, went up to 50% of its rated thrust in the two-second test.
The goal of the test was to see how the engine started up and shut down, Andy Lapsa, chief executive of Stoke, said in an interview. “All of the complexity and a lot of the risk is in that startup transient and shutdown transient,” he said. “The duration of the test was short because the goal was to demonstrate the transient and then back out.”
Read the full article: spacenews.com
