Future Timeline

In a feat that can only be described as legendary, and after many months and a catastrophic setback, Polaris Spaceplanes has finally accomplished something that's never been done before: lit the fuse of an aerospike rocket in flight.

On October 29, 2024, over the Baltic Sea, Polaris Spaceplanes conducted a test flight of its MIRA II aircraft. The rocket-equipped plane followed a predetermined flight path on autopilot, powered by its four kerosene jet turbines, before successfully igniting its AS-1 LOX (liquid oxygen)/kerosene linear aerospike rocket engine for three seconds in flight, marking the very first ever test of an aerospike rocket in flight.

This is the first of more test flights to come. Polaris reported an acceleration of 4 m/s² and 900 newtons of thrust from the 16.4 ft (5 m), 505 lb (229 kg) airframe.

Centrifugal Magnetic Mirrors could enable commercial nuclear fusion reactors on Earth and are also promising for next level propulsion in space. There is funded near term work for both goals. An early Centrifugal Magnetic Mirror propulsion concept could achieve 1 to 10 newtons of thrust with 10,000 to 30000 ISP. This would be propulsion that is 30 to 100 times more fuel efficient than chemical propulsion.

The magnetic mirror is the simplest form of steady magnetic confinement, and centrifugal rotation at supersonic speeds makes it a promising fusion reactor candidate for its stability, engineering simplicity, and expected affordability with respect to other fusion concepts.

Neutron Rocket will give Rocket Lab a SpaceX Falcon 9 class vehicle. It will move them up from $8.5 million Electron rocket launches to $55 million per launch.

General Atomics Electromagnetic Systems (GA-EMS) has successfully tested the nuclear fuel that may one day propel and power the spacecraft of the future. The trials verify that the fuel can survive the harsh environment of a nuclear rocket reactor.

Up until now, the main way of propelling spacecraft has been through chemical rockets. To be fair, that's nothing to sneer at. Chemical engines put the first satellite into space, the first man on the Moon, and have sent the first deep space probes hurtling out of our solar system.

However, chemical rockets have reached the theoretical limits of their capabilities. In fact, they already did so when the first German V-2 rocket reached space in 1942. Since then all the advances have been in making rockets larger and more efficient through innovations peripheral to the rocket engine itself.

There are alternatives to chemical rockets, such as ion drives and solar sails, but these produce minuscule thrust and have limited applications. For really ambitious projects, what space engineers want is something with at least a third more power than the best chemical rocket. If such an engine could be made, it would allow for fast shuttles between low Earth orbit and the Moon, the ability to quickly shift orbits at short notice, and to send large crewed missions to Mars and other planets in a reasonable time frame.

A new test of nuclear propellant fuel under space-like conditions has been hailed as a success by NASA and General Atomics Electromagnetic Systems (GA-EMS), in what is considered one more step on the road to nuclear-powered rocket engines. Such designs have long been suggested as a more efficient method of space travel and could cut interplanetary voyages down to just a few weeks.

While this latest test doesn’t make nuclear-powered rocket engines viable just yet, it’s an important step on the journey. This latest batch of tests was conducted at the compact fuel element environmental test (CFEET) facility at NASA MSFC, as per Space.com. It cycled the nuclear thermal propulsion (NTP) fuel up to 2600 Kelvin (4,220 Fahrenheit) and back down again several times, using superheated hydrogen.

NASA's Artemis campaign will use human landing systems, provided by SpaceX and Blue Origin, to safely transport crew to and from the surface of the moon, in preparation for future crewed missions to Mars. As the landers touch down and lift off from the moon, rocket exhaust plumes will affect the top layer of lunar "soil," called regolith, on the moon. When the lander's engines ignite to decelerate prior to touchdown, they could create craters and instability in the area under the lander and send regolith particles flying at high speeds in various directions.

To better understand the physics behind the interaction of exhaust from the commercial human landing systems and the moon's surface, engineers and scientists at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, recently test-fired a 14-inch hybrid rocket motor more than 30 times. The 3D-printed hybrid rocket motor, developed at Utah State University in Logan, Utah, ignites both solid fuel and a stream of gaseous oxygen to create a powerful stream of rocket exhaust.

A team of researchers from Texas A&M University is developing a new 3D printed material that can release a coolant gas during spacecraft re-entry to help protect them from overheating. The technique could reduce the need for ablative materials, speeding up the recovery of reusable spacecraft.

The typical ways to ensure a spacecraft isn't heavily damaged during descent are to use single-use ablative heat shields, which burn away, or ceramic tiles, which can withstand the heat, but must be replaced before the spacecraft can be reused. Both techniques require heavy maintenance following a descent, as well as the destruction of material as part of it. The new 3D printed material would theoretically only require refilling with coolant gas before the heat shield could be reused.

In theory, it could take the weeks or months-long refurbishment of spacecraft and reduce it to mere days, or hours, making it much-more akin to a commercial jet.

A US-based propulsion company has successfully launched and flown a new rocket powered by a unique rotating detonation engine. Although relatively small by rocket standards, the test could pave the way for much more dramatic test flights, in turn leading to hypersonic rockets, jets, and even more efficient spacecraft in the not-too-distant future.

Rotating detonation engines (RDE) have been theorized and partially tested for decades and considered a potential future solution to inefficient chemical rocket space travel. It works by continually detonating explosions in a circular channel, allowing the igniting flame to travel at supersonic speeds. That makes for faster combustion and more efficient fuel usage. Some theoretical RDE designs could end up more than 25% more efficient than traditional combustion within rocket engines.

Over the past decade, a U.K.-based nuclear propulsion startup has been working behind the scenes to develop a fusion rocket that could cut flight time to Mars in half. This week, it unveiled the concept in a striking new video.

The Sunbird Migratory Transfer Vehicle, designed by Pulsar Fusion, would be capable of reaching 329,000 miles per hour (over 529,000 kilometers per hour), the company claims. This would make it the fastest self-propelled object ever created, drastically reducing space travel time.

Unlike current rockets that launch from terrestrial bases, Sunbirds would be stored on giant orbital docking stations each designed to host up to five at a time, Richard Dinan, CEO of Pulsar Fusion, told Gizmodo in an email.

The US Air Force is investing in a transport system that could one day deliver 100 tonnes for cargo or personnel by rocket to any spot on Earth in under 90 minutes. Unimaginatively called Rocket Cargo, it may begin preliminary tests next year.

Dutch computer scientist Edsger Wybe Dijkstra once said, "There are only two worthwhile speeds: instantaneous and walking." We aren't quite there yet, but the US Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL) wants to push one end of the spectrum a bit closer to the instantaneous point with its Rocket Cargo project.

Part of the Rocket Experimentation for Global Agile Logistics (REGAL) program, Rocket Cargo seeks to develop a commercial reusable transport rocket that is capable of boosting into suborbital trajectory and landing anywhere on Earth in 60 to 90 minutes. Not only that, the final vehicle is expected to have the cargo capacity of a Globemaster III transport plane. That's 77 tonnes of groceries at one go.

In what may be a world first, Venus Aerospace has, for the first time in the US, successfully flown a Rotating Detonation Rocket Engine (RDRE) that uses supersonic explosions to create thrust. Such engines could help propel future hypersonic vehicles.

The May 14, 2025 Venus Aerospace test flight took place at Spaceport America next to the White Sand Missile Range in New Mexico and may be the world's first flight of an RDRE. It's hard to be definite because in 2021 and 2024 the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) tested its own version of the engine, but these occurred on sounding rockets fired into space, while the US tests were in the atmosphere, where the RDRE played a key part in the takeoff and flight.

Let the hair splitting begin.

The latest RDRE test is part of the company's efforts to develop a hypersonic vehicle capable of flying at speeds of up to Mach 6 and a RDRE/ramjet engine capable of propelling it from a conventional takeoff, to cruising, to landing.

New Zealand-based Dawn Aerospace is now accepting preorders for its Aurora spaceplane, a sub-orbital, reusable craft which can carry 22lb payloads to altitudes up to just over 60 miles. That's not a lot and not particularly high, but Dawn pitches this craft as capable of performing such launches up to 1,000 times, potentially bringing the cost of carrying materials beyond the thickest portions of Earth's atmosphere down to just $100,000 per launch.

While headlines are so often grabbed by the big rockets and even bigger explosions, there is a burgeoning industry of smaller rockets and reusable craft hoping to fill a niche that the big launch vehicles can't. Dawn Aerospace is taking a slightly different approach to most smaller launch companies, though. Instead of selling capacity on its own launches, Dawn Aerospace wants to sell the launch vehicle itself directly to consumers.