LEAP Space has recently revealed the first major piece of its Bighorn launch vehicle: the Serrano engine.
Faithful to its three operating principles, simplicity, responsiveness, and mass production, the Serrano engine has been engineered to deliver high performance while simplifying production.
Additive manufacturing lets engineers merge what would normally be hundreds of separately machined and assembled engine parts into a single, consolidated structure.
Using large-scale DMLS 3D printing, the single-print thrust chamber enables rapid iteration for design and build speeds compatible with the company’s modern design and testing approach.
The Colorado-based launch company is betting that a simplified, additively manufactured engine architecture can make rockets mass-producible enough to serve both on-demand orbital launch and sub-hour point-to-point cargo delivery. Serrano now moves into integration and hot-fire testing, the stage that will determine whether the printed chamber can hold up to the mission profile LEAP is designing Bighorn for: carrying payloads to, through and from space.
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