Defense Business Brief: Rocket engine startup eyes production; NATO Summit Day 1; Anduril’s first NATO contract

Rocket engine startup Venus Aerospace only has one major test flight under its belt, but the company just raised $91 million from investors ready to bet on future production demands.The Series B funding round was led by the venture capital firm Mercury Fund and with participation from other investors, including Lockheed Martin Ventures, which noted the company’s rapid development of its rotating detonation rocket engine—which uses continuous supersonic detonation waves to generate thrust—calling it a welcomed addition to the defense ecosystem. “Since our initial investment, Venus has progressed very quickly in its technology development. Our reinvestment in Venus recognizes Venus’ accomplishments to date and focus on speed to manufacture, cost management and reduction of supply chain constraints. Venus is working effectively to position its propulsion system for the production scale required by defense programs,” Chris Moran, vice president and general manager of Lockheed Martin Ventures, said in a statement.And setting up the building blocks for growth is the six-year-old startup’s chief focus.“We are really focused on growing the foundation that we have to be able to scale to meet the commercial and government demand that we're going to have for this system,” including hiring more talent and increasing manufacturing capacity, Tom Barron, chief operating officer for Venus Aerospace, told Defense One. That also means growing “the mundane but super important sort of business process and architecture required to meet high-consequence government contracts.” Barron wouldn’t specify when its rotating detonation rocket engines might enter production, what the company’s manufacturing targets were, or how many people they plan to hire. Hinting at forthcoming announcements, he said the plan is to hire “technical and business talent” while “growing our in-house manufacturing capacity” and testing. Last year, the Houston-based startup finished a flight test of its engine, which uses a continuous supersonic combustion process to burn fuel and is made up of 3D-printed components: “it's literally a rotating detonation wave inside the engine. The engine body itself is only three pieces,” Barron said.The engine promises to be more efficient and travel further, faster, than traditional rocket motors by 15 percent, the company said of the test flight results. It takes about two weeks to produce through machining and 3D printing. And key to future production, and development, is being able to test and integrate changes quickly.“We co-located our rocket-engine testing, our manufacturing, and our design engineering all in one place,” Barron said in an interview. “We test rocket engines 500 feet behind me, whereas if you go to basically any other major rocket engine designer, builder, they're doing it in the desert somewhere. And so you have this enormous lag driving eight hours into Mojave or into another remote area. So being able to test is a critical component of what we do.”The funding announcement comes as the White House pressures weapons makers to speed up production amid supply chain delays and skyrocketing demands for solid rocket motors needed to propel munitions and space architecture. And as geopolitical tensions highlight near-term shortfalls, there’s a longer play Venus is hoping to make. “Solid rocket motors are a 70-year-old technology,” Barron said. “We still need that technology to rebuild our capacity to produce those propulsion solutions. But we're at the margins of their performance.”“We deliver performance that doubles the range relative to solid rocket motors for several classes of munitions. And then in space, which is a massively growing market…that can either quadruple your payload or massively reduce the cost to launch. And so being able to deliver what our future capabilities, not just supply shortfalls of current capabilities, is what makes our engine different. It's a fundamentally new, novel, transformative technology.”WelcomeYou’ve reached the Defense Business Brief, where we dig into what the Pentagon buys, who they’re buying from, and why. Send along your tips, feedback, and song recommendations to lwilliams@defenseone.com. Check out the Defense Business Brief archive here, and tell your friends to subscribe!U.S.-NATO tensions remain, but there are still deals to be made. NATO leaders announced a flurry of new weapons deals Tuesday, estimated to be in the “tens of billions”—a demonstration of the increased defense spending President Donald Trump demanded last year. But while European countries have made strides to meet the 5 percent of GDP spending targets, there’s still work to be done, especially with the domestic industrial base, said NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte.

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