Special Aerospace Services (SAS) is proposing a new and innovative ascent/descent engine using methane as its propellant. This engine will utilize the concepts of the Oxidizer Rich Staged Combustion (ORSC) cycle of the RD-8 to improve on performance over existing hardware. This SBIR program will leverage existing work SAS has done in conjunction with DARPA to on the RD-8 preburner to design and analyze a new engine with the benefits of the RD-8, but being able to use methane as the propellant. Additive manufacturing will be used to build the components of the engine to reduce cost and limitations in design.
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