Launch Canada owns the intellectual property in the rocket turbopump its volunteers are building. Founder and president Adam Trumpour is weighing whether to license it to a partner or spin off a for-profit arm, he told the organization’s conference in Timmins, Ont., on Saturday. The question came from the floor.
“Another possibility would be for Launch Canada to spin off a for-profit arm that could actually go and start commercializing these technologies,” Trumpour said. Either route waits on the hardware. “Until we have actual hardware, we don’t really have anything to offer,” he said. “Talk is cheap.” Under a licence, he said, he would push for a flight test as soon as possible.
Launch Canada describes itself as a national non-profit. It runs the Launch Canada Challenge, the student rocketry competition whose fifth launch week ends Aug. 21.
Federal funding came with conditions, Trumpour said, so Launch Canada had to be “a little bit more restricted” about who holds what. The money is a $350,000 award from the Canadian Space Agency’s Space Technology Development Program, the first CSA support of its kind for the organization.
Canada’s first turbopump
A turbopump force-feeds propellant into a rocket engine. “Canada has never developed a turbopump before,” Trumpour told SpaceQ in December; on stage he called them “the largest gap currently in Canada’s rocket propulsion expertise.” They do not scale down gracefully either, which is why Launch Canada is attempting what may be the smallest one ever built, sized to a 1,000-pound-thrust engine its students hot-fired in 2021. He sees uses in small planetary landers and space tugs, which move satellites between orbits.
The work runs in three phases. The first, an electric-motor-driven kerosene pump, is in final assembly and close to its first test runs. Its rotor turns at about 50,000 revolutions per minute, and the motor behind it can draw more than 400 amps. That is “the entire electrical service to a decent sized house,” Trumpour said, “going into this thing the size of a can of Coke.”
A liquid oxygen pump is well into detailed design; the team is looking at custom motors that would be cooled by the oxygen they pump. Last comes the gas generator, a small rocket motor whose exhaust would spin the turbine and make the machine a true turbopump. That is the main work of 2027, Trumpour told SpaceQ in December.
Much of the pump is printed in titanium rather than machined. EOS, the German additive-manufacturing company, prints components and trained the team to design for the process. A second German firm is working on bearings made from a ceramic matrix composite, and a modified fuel pump is being built to test them. Bearings limit how long a turbopump can run, Trumpour said, and these could last almost indefinitely.
Money for outside teams
Launch Canada is getting $1.2 million from the Department of National Defence, announced on the same stage that morning under its Launch the North challenge. Part of it pays for more work like the turbopump. The rest goes somewhere new. For the first time, Launch Canada will put cash and engineering help behind projects run by teams outside it.
The first is a rotating detonation engine, which burns propellant behind a supersonic shock wave rather than a conventional flame. In theory it is about 20 per cent more efficient. Ariyanna Kresnyak, a University of Waterloo doctoral candidate who co-founded the Arbalest Rocketry student team, will build it with two master’s students. Launch Canada has approached the German Aerospace Center (DLR) and the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology about sending students to work on theirs.
About 50 students and volunteers work on the turbopump, some now at rocket companies here and abroad. Trumpour says a group like that can build serious hardware for “about one order of magnitude lower cost than what any company ever could.”
More SpaceQ coverage: Launch Canada · Space Technology Development Program · Launch Canada student teams share the hard parts.