Arkadia Space tests its first hydrogen peroxide thruster in orbit

WASHINGTON — Spanish startup Arkadia Space has successfully tested in orbit a thruster it has developed that uses hydrogen peroxide as propellant.

The company announced June 9 that its DARK propulsion system, incorporated into a D-Orbit ION vehicle launched in March, has carried out a series of test firings in orbit. Arkadia said the system, featuring a thruster producing five newtons of thrust, performed both hundreds of very short pulses firing for tens of milliseconds at a time as well as longer “steady state” burns of up to five seconds.

Francho Garcia, chief executive and co-founder of Arkadia Space, said in a recent interview that the goal of that test campaign was to compare the performance of the thruster in space to previous ground tests. “What we have found is that it is exactly the same as the ground data,” he said of the thruster’s in-space performance. “It was much better than what we were expecting, honestly.”

Those tests, he noted, were coordinated with D-Orbit, since the DARK system was a hosted payload on the ION vehicle and not part of that spacecraft’s own propulsion system. The two companies have worked together well in the testing campaign, he said.

“We are proud to have hosted Arkadia Space’s DARK module aboard our ION Satellite Carrier,” Matteo Andreas Lorenzoni, vice president of commercial strategy at D-Orbit, said in a statement. “From the very beginning, working with the Arkadia team has been a real pleasure, and every step of our collaboration has been smooth and rewarding.”

Garcia said Arkadia planned to continue testing the propulsion system for as long a sone year, depending on the status of the thruster and remaining fuel, to measure the long-term performance of the system.

The test is a milestone both for Arkadia and for the development of so-called “green” propulsion systems that use non-toxic propellants as an alternative to hydrazine. He said that the company showed the benefits of green propulsion, including easier and less expensive fueling during pre-launch processing, when preparing the ION vehicle for launch on SpaceX’s Transporter-13 mission from Vandenberg Space Force Base.

“We demonstrated in Vandenberg that we could drastically reduce the cost of operations,” he said. “For us, this alone was a successful achievement.”

Garcia said the easier handling is a key selling point for satellite developers, particularly those who want to fly on SpaceX’s rideshare missions. SpaceX, he said, has limited the number of times its customers can fly satellites with hydrazine because of the additional expense. “A number of customers in the U.S. have told us they need to go green, otherwise, they will not be able to fly on every SpaceX launch.”

Arkadia is also seeing interest in its hydrogen peroxide propulsion systems from developers of launch vehicles and return capsules, including an agreement in February to provide reaction control system thrusters for MaiaSpace’s reusable launch vehicle in development. Those customers, he noted, don’t have concerns about the lifetime of the thrusters since they are used on short missions.

“We believe that with the data that we have,” he said of the tests of the thruster in orbit, “we should have no problems signing the first customers.”