NordSpace advances Canadian launch plans with Hadfield-150 metal AM engine
NordSpace, based in Markham, Ontario, Canada, has revealed the Hadfield-150, its orbital-class engine featuring a combustion chamber produced using metal Additive Manufacturing, built for the company’s light- and medium-lift orbital launch vehicles. The company states that the patent-pending Hadfield-150 is the only Canadian orbital-class engine of its kind to have reached this stage of development.
NordSpace stated that years of designing, building and testing its first liquid engine to combine AM with regenerative cooling, the Hadfield-10 series, laid the groundwork for the Hadfield-150.
The Hadfield-150 series is designed to power Tundra and Tundra+, NordSpace’s light and medium-lift vehicles, with headroom built in to scale towards Tempest, the company’s larger reusable medium-lift rocket. The engine is being produced at Rocket Factory 1 using the company’s expanding metal AM fleet at the AMA Lab. NordSpace states that the engine was designed for reusability and medium-lift applications from the outset, with an architecture intended to reduce the time, cost, and infrastructure associated with iterative engine testing, while allowing the design to scale to larger engines. The Hadfield-150 is also manufactured to be engine-out capable.
The engine was purpose-built for Canada’s Launch the North initiative, which is intended to bring sovereign launch capability online quickly and affordably.
NordSpace plans to begin initial testing later this year on Blackhawk, NordSpace’s new orbital engine test cell at Area 66, the company’s private Ontario test range, with full stacked vehicle testing to follow at its Atlantic Spaceport Complex (ASX) in Newfoundland and Labrador.
