Aurora Suborbital Mission Service

Accelerate your program with low-cost, high-cadence access to microgravity, altitudes up to 100 km, and speeds over Mach 3. Aurora enables you to deploy, test and iterate within hours.

The Aurora Spaceplane is an uncrewed rocket-powered aircraft that provides routine, affordable access to suborbital space and speeds over Mach 3.

The resources once required for a single, disposable launch can now yield a campaign with dozens of flights. With Aurora, you can deploy, retrieve, and redeploy with a turnaround time of just four hours.

Objectives and Mission

Progress is fastest when ideas are tested early and often. Aurora brings this paradigm shift to the access of high altitudes and speeds for 15 kg class payloads.

Aurora is an aircraft with the performance of a rocket. Not a rocket with wings. It requires just a 1000 m runway to operate, and can perform multiple flights daily. For customers, that means shorter lead times, lower costs, and payload recovery within minutes of landing.

With a fully-restartable and throttlable rocket engine, Aurora is capable of performing a wide variety of bespoke flight profiles to meet your mission objectives. For example:

The suborbital flight profile maximises time in reduced gravity, and access to the upper atmosphere for sampling. Up to two minutes of high quality microgravity, lunar gravity and martian gravity are available. During this time, optical payloads may be pointed and fixed at any attitude.

The Boost-Glide Profile is optimized to reach high Mach numbers within the atmosphere. With this profile, the Aurora can reach speeds up to Mach 3.7 and perform a range of maneuvers in the supersonic regime.

With a trackrecord of 60+ successful missions, Aurora is the first step towards Dawn Aerospace’s mission to make spaceflight as common as commercial aviation, enabling truly scalable and sustainable space transportation.

More details on Aurora’s capabilities and applications can be found in the Mission User’s Guide.

Significant Achievements

The Aurora spaceplane has a strong history of proven flight heritage. Over 64 successful misssions have been completed from multiple sites with zero vehicle or payload losses.

In 2024, Aurora set the record for the fastest climb from runway to above 20km, breaking a nearly 50-year-old record previously held by the modified F-15 Streak Eagle. Aurora is also the highest-cadence rocket-powered aircraft currently operating, with a demonstrated turn around time of just four hours between flights.

Get in Touch

Zach Preston, Commercial Lead, Spaceplane – zach@dawnaerospace.com
Or missions@dawnaerospace.com

Aurora Suborbital in the Media

Dawn’s Suborbital Spaceplane Completes Radar Tracking Experiment with Defence Science and Technology

Aurora completed the DARTE (Dawn Aerospace Radar Tracking Experiment) mission in partnership with Defence Science and Technology, the New Zealand Defence Force, and the Royal New Zealand Navy, demonstrating naval radar tracking of a reusable rocket-powered aircraft flying high-performance flight profiles off the coast of Canterbury.

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www.dawnaerospace.com

Dawn Aerospace Partners with Oklahoma Spaceport to Launch U.S. Based Spaceplane, Unlocking Daily Access to Space

• Dawn Aerospace’s Breakthrough – The fastest, highest-flying rocket-powered aircraft to launch from a runway, the Aurora is set to be the first aircraft to reach the Karman line - 100 km altitude - twice in one day • Space-Accessible State – Dawn Aerospace to establish operations at the Oklahoma Air and Space Port in Burns Flat, transforming the State into a launch point for microgravity research in the United States • Proven Performance – Aurora has flown 58 times and went supersonic in Nov 2

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www.dawnaerospace.com

California Polytechnic State University Makes History: First U.S. Research Payload Flies on Dawn Aerospace’s Reusable Aurora Spaceplane

CalPoly fly payload on Dawn Aerospace’s suborbital spaceplane, Aurora

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www.dawnaerospace.com

Mission User’s Guide

Aurora Mission User Guide

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drive.google.com

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