Thrust you can
put a number
on
Three families, 0.5 N to 45 kN. All three are hot-fired at Westcott before they leave us, and every unit ships with its own test data, not a family average.
Chemical when you need
the impulse now
Electric when you can trade time for propellant mass. Most missions we work on end up with both, which is why the three families share a common valve interface, a common test harness and one set of contamination rules.
- LOX / kerosene
- ADN monopropellant
- Xenon & krypton
- Additive-manufactured chambers
- Regenerative cooling
- Ceramic thermal barrier
FULMAR‑2
45 kN pump-fed upper-stage engine
Built for small launch vehicles that need a restartable upper stage without a staged-combustion budget. The chamber and injector are printed as one part, which removed 61 joints and about nine weeks from the build.
| Thrust (vacuum) | 45.2 kN |
|---|---|
| Specific impulse | 331 s (vacuum, nominal mixture) |
| Chamber pressure | 62 bar |
| Mixture ratio | 2.34 ± 0.04, closed loop |
| Throttle range | 60–105 % |
| Restarts | 3 qualified, 5 demonstrated |
| Cumulative burn | 320 s qualified per unit |
| Dry mass | 78 kg including gimbal actuators |
| Status | Qualified 2024 · 11 flight units delivered |
2,142 seconds of hot-fire across three qualification models.
Two unplanned shutdowns, both traced to ground-side instrumentation.
ADN blends are not the miracle the marketing suggests, but they let a team fuel a spacecraft in a polo shirt rather than a SCAPE suit. On a 19-unit constellation that is three weeks of schedule back.
SKUA‑4
Green monopropellant reaction control
A family of ADN-blend thrusters at 1 N, 22 N and 220 N sharing one catalyst bed design and one valve. The 22 N variant is the one most people mean when they say SKUA; it has flown on nineteen platforms.
| Thrust | 22 N nominal (1 N and 220 N variants available) |
|---|---|
| Specific impulse | 235 s steady state |
| Feed pressure | 5.5–22 bar, blow-down capable |
| Minimum impulse bit | 0.09 Ns at 20 ms on-time |
| Qualified pulses | 1.2 million, plus 6.5 hours steady state |
| Preheat | 18 W for 240 s from cold |
| Mass | 0.42 kg per thruster, 1.9 kg per four-thruster cluster |
| Status | Qualified 2019 · 84 flight units delivered |
TERN‑1.2
Hall-effect thruster and power processing unit
Designed for constellation station keeping and end-of-life disposal, where the number that matters is total impulse per kilogram of wet system, not peak thrust. Runs on xenon or krypton with a software change and a different flow-controller orifice.
| Discharge power | 300–1,400 W |
|---|---|
| Thrust | 18–82 mN |
| Specific impulse | 1,150–1,750 s depending on set point |
| Propellant | Xenon or krypton |
| Total impulse | 1.9 MNs qualified (6,800 hours) |
| Mass | 3.9 kg thruster, 5.2 kg PPU |
| Status | Qualified 2025 · first flight Q1 2027 |
The things buyers
ask on the second call
If yours is not here, ring the Filton switchboard and ask for propulsion. Someone technical will answer.
For SKUA-4, sixteen weeks from purchase order to a hot-fired flight unit, assuming a standard interface. FULMAR-2 is nine months because of the powder-bed slot and the two-week hot isostatic press cycle. TERN-1.2 is currently twenty-two weeks, limited by the PPU's magnetics supplier rather than by us.
Usually, and we will tell you what it costs in qualification before you commit. Bracket and harness changes are cheap. Anything that alters the feed system pressure schedule triggers a delta-qualification campaign, which is roughly eleven weeks and the price of two units.
No. All three families are designed and built without US-origin controlled content, and we maintain a declared bill of materials to prove it. UK export licensing still applies and we handle the applications. Expect four to six weeks for a standard destination.
An acceptance data package: the certificate of conformity, dimensional inspection against the released model, proof and leak results, hot-fire traces at 1 kHz, cleanliness certificates, material traceability to melt lot, and the non-conformance history including anything we dispositioned use-as-is.
Two engineers travel as standard for a first flight, and one for subsequent flights of the same configuration. Fuelling support is quoted separately because it depends on the range's rules, not ours.
