Despite the incredible growth of the space industry over the past ten years, there are still few places in the United States dedicated to testing rocket engines and spacecraft. This is not a problem for large companies like SpaceX and Blue Origin, which can afford to build their own; but almost everyone else faces long wait times and high costs.
Agile space industries is looking to change that. Founder Daudi Barnes founded the company in 2019 to augment the work of his previous company, Advanced Mobile Propulsion Test. AMPT provided testing of hypergolic engines, but like Agile, the company has expanded into propulsion systems, thrusters, rocket engines and ground support equipment.
The Colorado-based startup already operates one test rig, called Sunshine, which AMPT installed in 2010. Last week, it opened a second rig, called Animas, the only commercial facility capable of vacuum testing hypergolic engines weighing more than 300 pounds. and up to 6,000 pounds of thrust, the company says.
“The market is expanding very, very rapidly at the moment,” explained Animas project manager Graham Dudley. “The barrier to entry for rocket engines has been lowered, so there are a lot of people in that game. But to test? “It’s really, really hard to do.”
Animas is designed to be modular, so it can be used for testing campaigns ranging from initial prototype testing to qualification and acceptance testing. The support is built on skids, in pieces that can be moved or replaced, so Agile can handle any type of testing he (or a client) needs.
Engine testing provides the company with an additional source of income, offering services to other space companies while allowing for faster internal engine development.
Image credit: Agile Space Industries.
“Being able to have easy access to testing early in your programs is really helpful,” said Mesa Hollinbeck, principal test engineer at Agile. “We've run into several programs, when we were AMPT, that got too far into their design before they actually fired (the engine), and it didn't work. So they've had over four years of design and development where they have to restart, and that's really expensive and difficult for schedule prediction. So having early access to testing is definitely an issue for a lot of the industry.”
Vacuum testing is especially important for propulsion systems in space, because that test is specifically designed to simulate the space environment. But this requires a lot of resources, Hollinbeck said: “A lot of smaller NewSpace companies find it very expensive to install that infrastructure and don't want to make that investment. They want to spend their money elsewhere. It's kind of easy to make a cool video of an engine in the desert with a really cheap dyno, but getting real data that allows you to fly your rig is a higher level of sophistication.”
Owning the testbed means that agile engineers have access to a lot of data about their systems. It's a competitive advantage in the space propulsion market, which has become increasingly crowded as the cost of putting spacecraft into orbit has fallen. Many engines fire for the first time in orbit, but that could change as more expensive, high-profile missions head to the Moon and deep space.
Dudley said that some of the external requests for testing that Agile has received indicated “a concern from multiple organizations that there is not enough testing of the engines that are being used in some of the missions that they are supporting, and that they are putting those missions in risk.”
“We are hearing that directly, that the reason they want to come to us is because they are concerned that if they can't find evidence, it will increase the risk profile for their missions, and it is unacceptable for them in the future. “
