WASHINGTON — Dawn Aerospace announced May 22 that it has started taking orders for an uncrewed spaceplane capable of taking small payloads on suborbital flights.
The New Zealand company said it is beginning sales of the Aurora spaceplane, a vehicle capable of carrying six kilograms of payload to an altitude of 100 kilometers. First deliveries of the vehicle are projected in 2027.
Dawn Aerospace is following a model from commercial aviation rather than spaceflight with Aurora, selling the vehicle to customers who will operate it rather than flying the vehicle on its own. That will, the company argues, expand the potential market for the vehicle compared to the traditional approach of selling launch services.
“There are many out there who would love to have this capability and be willing to pay for it, but they simply can’t get their hands on it. It’s not for sale,” Stefan Powell, chief executive of Dawn Aerospace, said of launch vehicles during a May 22 webinar organized by the Global Spaceport Alliance.
He contrasted that with commercial aviation’s approach where airliners are operated not by the companies that build them but instead by airlines. “The airline model presents us with a far more scalable model for transportation, and one that we would really like to draw on.”
That mirroring of commercial aviation extends to Aurora itself. The company has been testing versions of the vehicle for several years, including a flight in November 2024 where the Mark 2 Aurora reached supersonic speeds for the first time. On that flight the vehicle reached a top speed of Mach 1.12 and peak altitude of 25.1 kilometers.
“This is an aircraft with the performance of a rocket, not a rocket with wings,” he said. “That is to say, reliability, reusability and, ultimately, scalability are not afterthoughts but baked in from day one to enable this airline model.”
Dawn Aerospace is working on the new version of Aurora capable of suborbital flights. That includes increased propellant and engine thrust, as well as the addition of reaction control system thrusters to provide control outside the atmosphere. Those modifications will be accommodated within the same outer mold line as the previous version.
The first Aurora suborbital vehicle will be ready for flight within 18 months, starting a flight test program lasting six to nine months. Those test flights will start at low altitudes but quickly progress to much higher altitudes.
On a typical suborbital flight, Aurora will take off from a runway and immediately head straight up. The vehicle will reach top speeds of Mach 3.5 on a flight and offer about three minutes of microgravity during the peak of its trajectory. The overall flight, from takeoff to landing, will last about half an hour, Powell estimated, with most of that time spent gliding back to a runway landing after reentry.
Aurora is powered by an engine that uses 90% hydrogen peroxide and kerosene D60 propellants. Fully loaded, the spaceplane weighs 450 kilograms and can take off from a runway 1,000 meters long.
Dawn has demonstrated the ability to turn around the vehicle for another flight within six hours and Powell said a four-hour turnaround time should be achievable. “That would make the first aircraft ever — the first vehicle of any kind, actually — to fly above the Kármán Line twice in one day.”
Markets and vehicle economics
Dawn Aerospace is taking orders now for the Aurora spaceplane for deliveries starting in 2027. The company has not disclosed pricing for the vehicle, and Powell suggested the company would tailor pricing to each customer.
He said that the company estimates, based on market research, that a per-flight price of $100,000 is “absolutely tenable,” and the price could go higher for missions with more customized flight needs. He projects Aurora could fly 100 times a year and has a design life of 1,000 flights, with a total revenue per vehicle of about $100 million.
Dawn Aerospace has attracted some customers for test flights of the Mark 2 Aurora, including three universities — Arizona State University, California Polytechnic State University and Johns Hopkins University — as well as Scout Space, a company developing space domain awareness services.
That “technology pull,” as Powell put it, leads the company to believe that even a small vehicle like Aurora can find a place in the market. The company envisions applications such as microgravity life sciences and semiconductor research as well as testing defense payloads, like sensors and communications systems, in a near-space environment.
“There is real commercial demand in suborbital flight, even with this small vehicle size,” he said.
The Dawn Aerospace announcement was welcomed by the Global Spaceport Alliance (GSA), an industry group whose members include many spaceports either still in development or which are underutilized because they lack the infrastructure to support vertical launches. A spaceplane like Aurora creates new possibilities for those spaceports.
“Very few of them are regularly conducting launches today,” George Nield, chairman of the GSA, said of spaceports, because of a lack of infrastructure or locations near densely populated areas.
“A vehicle like the one Dawn Aerospace has developed changes all of that,” he said. “With a small, reusable system that can operate from a standard runway, there’s no reason why any spaceport with a runway couldn’t provide regular access to space.”
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