Rocket Lab’s engineers successfully completed a hot fire test of its Archimedes engine, a significant step towards the first scheduled flight of the Neutron medium payload rocket for mid-2025.
All the major structures on Neutron feature advanced design of carbon fiber composites. At the start of the development process, composite components were painstakingly hand laid on molds. Rocket Lab is now using an advanced Automated Fiber Placement (AFP) machine, increasing productivity, and decreasing time invested in part development. The carbon fiber sheets are placed layer by layer in a variety of directions providing the strength and rigidity required in components facing the extreme environments the rocket will encounter. Hand layup of key structures would have taken weeks to complete, and the AFP machine allows such tasks to be completed in 24 hours.
Rocket Lab founder and CEO, Sir Peter Beck, says: “Hot firing Archimedes is a major development milestone for Neutron and our team has done it on an accelerated timeline. Taking a new staged combustion liquid rocket engine from cleansheet design to hot fire in just a couple of years is industry-leading stuff. We’ve been consistently impressed with the performance of Archimedes in test, including with this hot fire, so with this critical milestone completed, we move into production of flight engines confidently and begin to close out the qualification test campaign in parallel to really hone performance for launch next year. From the day we started designing Archimedes we focused on delivering a flight engine, rather than early-stage prototype destined for multiple reworks and adjustments, so it’s gratifying to see this strategy bear fruit.”
Now that the hot fire testing is complete and the qualification process is in the works, the Rocket Lab team can move into full production of the flight engines.
For information on the introduction of the Neutron launch vehicle project please visit this CM Blog post: World’s First Carbon Fiber Composite Large Launch Vehicle Introduced | Composites Manufacturing Magazine
