Rocket Propulsion, AI, and the Future of Engineering Workflows

So Balan, for listeners who may not be familiar with Reaction Dynamics, can you briefly describe the company's mission, your role there, and the hybrid rocket propulsion architecture your team is developing?

yeah so i'm a senior rocket propulsion engineer at reaction dynamics reaction dynamics is a small satellite launch vehicle provider uh we're up in montreal canada and we're powering around 200 kilogram payloads to space to around the low Earth orbit area.

And we have plans to build small lift vehicles and medium lift.

And our key differentiator, technological differentiator, is really our hybrid rocket propulsion architecture.

So we are solving a 50-year-old problem in chemical propulsion, which is hybrid rockets.

You may know liquids, you may know solids.

So the happy middle between those in terms of rocket propulsion are hybrids.

So what if you could have the mass efficiency of a solid, but the controllability of a liquid? And that's really what makes a hybrid special.

But the only issue with hybrids is that they're all based on an architecture that's about 50, 60 years old.

You know, NASA developed this around the 50s and 60s, and they were really keen on it because you can get it way less complex rocket, uh very mass efficient still controllable but it was a massive r d project they decided to set it aside and ended up pursuing the liquid rockets instead and that was based on a lot of um you know the know-how they had from a lot of the german engineers that came over at the world war ii and things like that um but it's basically just sat on the shelf for 50 years and we've picked that up and over the past nine years we've been doing the r d that's necessary to actually get those systems performance so we have patents around The engine is completely novel, completely different architecture that solves that issue.

And that issue is really the decaying thrust curve problem, where as the burn progresses, the port grows, you have a runaway combustion inefficiency, and it makes it very difficult to get to orbit.

So our architecture solves that issue.

We have stable thrust throughout the burn.

And we're able to actually use hybrids for the small satellite launch vehicle market, which is really going to enable that niche.

You know, a lot of rocket companies have moved on to larger and larger rockets because of just the economics around it.

You know, whether you're building a small satellite launch vehicle or a large one, you have a very similar part count, similar complexity.

So that's why they've kind of abandoned the small satellite launch.

But hybrids, they will re-enable that.