The Oklahoma Air and Space Port hosted a conference on Wednesday in Burns Flat featuring representatives from Dawn Aerospace, a New Zealand company that has partnered with the Oklahoma Department of Aerospace and Aeronautics to help usher in a new chapter of space industry to Oklahoma.
In the second quarter of 2027, Dawn Aerospace will launch the first flight of the Dawn Aerospace Spaceplane from the Oklahoma Air and Space Port.
“I expect that we will fill the grass and the pavement and the viewing areas with hundreds, if not thousands, of people to see the first flight of this amazing Dawn Aerospace aircraft,” said Grayson Ardies, executive director of the Oklahoma Department of Aerospace and Aeronautics and chief executive officer of the Oklahoma Space Industry Development Authority.
Lead Propulsion Engineer Ralph Huijsman and Account Manager Aleisha Draper appeared to introduce Dawn Aerospace and the Spaceplane, called the MK-II Aurora. The working prototype is the MK-II A, while the MK-II B – a larger, faster vehicle with higher altitude capabilities – is in development.
“Dawn was founded in 2017,” said Huijsman. “Over the years, we’ve grown from a handful of people to about 120 people today. And we’re still growing … We’ve put, to date, about 160 thrusters in space, on about 38 satellites. Our propulsion systems have been flown on four different launch vehicles across the world. We’ve got it on Falcon 9, Vega, Soyuz-2, and we’ve also got it on Rocket Lab in New Zealand.”
For Dawn Aerospace, reusability is a key innovative goal. “In most industries, reusability is taken for granted; you all drive cars. You drive them many, many times, fuel them up, go on different trips. You’d be very surprised if someone told you, after 20 trips, you have to buy a new car. That would just be unthinkable. It would be quite ridiculous. Unfortunately, this is not true for the space sector,” said Huijsman. “A lot of things that we do in space are still single-use. We just launch a rocket up into space, and then we throw the whole thing away, rebuild a new one, and fly it again. As you can imagine, that’s a very expensive thing to do. We really believe that this is not how it has to be. We can definitely change that.”
So far, the team has completed more than 60 flights with the MK-II A, racking up approximately 12 hours of flight time. “May not sound like a lot, but for us, it’s definitely a significant amount, specifically considering a mission is about 20 minutes,” said Huijsman. “Every flight helped us build confidence in the aircraft and the processes – and also in ourselves – that we were able to do it.”
The current model is much smaller than what the final product will be. “The approach is that with the smaller vehicle, we can demonstrate a lot of things before we switch to a full-scale vehicle, and start scaling up our operations,” Huijsman explained. “This is sort of a next step, a steppingstone to a pathway to making this more and more everyday use. We envision, further down the line, bigger and bigger vehicles will be made. So maybe, we ultimately serve as a first stage to an orbital launch.”
“The spaceplane is designed to take off, land, refuel, and fly again, just like any regular aircraft. This is an aircraft with the performance of a rocket, so we do a lot of extreme things with it that normal aircraft wouldn’t do, but we want to tap into the reusability aspect of an aircraft,” Huijsman explained. “We would fuel the plane, roll it onto the runway, and take off like a regular aircraft. This is nothing special. Soon after takeoff, we would enter a vertical flight. This is a little bit different from a regular airflight … we’re pushing it all the way up to an 85-degree angle, and we’ll maintain this angle until the engine essentially runs out of fuel. We’ll shut down that engine, it will coast a little bit further until it hits its highest point, which we call the apogee, and while it’s coasting through apogee, essentially, the altitude combined with the freefall it’s in gives us a lot of microgravity, and that is something that a lot of customers are interested in.”
In generating commercial interest, Dawn Aerospace considers how the technology can be useful for society. “One of those interests is from the research and science community,” Huijsman said. “Being able to do research on a vehicle like that, with those speeds, with that altitude, with that microgravity, and range – it’s quite interesting for a lot of research institutes.”
The Spaceplane also provides a cost-effective alternative to concept testing, as Huijsman explained. “If you develop a satellite, it’s multiple millions of dollars of investment. And it has to work, in one go. Once it’s in space, you can’t repair it, you can’t service it. So companies are looking at cheaper ways to test those things before they actually send it all the way up to space, and we’re able to provide that kind of service,” he said. “With the AI boom, there’s a lot of demand for chips, and the microgravity environment provides a really great environment to grow crystals, and it’s apparently very interesting for those companies. They’ll be able to essentially buy a ticket on the plane and test their manufacturing methods in this microgravity environment.”
“That’s part of the unique capability that we offer, too, where we talk about the reusability of the aircraft,” said Draper. “You can put your payload in, we can take it up, you can fly it, they can test it, they can experiment with it, and when you bring it back down, they can make some tweaks, look at the data, and then we can put it back in and fly it straight back up again.”
The Spaceplane also has potential in defensive training, according to Huijsman. “This vehicle, with this high velocity and high-altitude, mimics modern-day threats quite well,” he said. “We’re together working with New Zealand defense, currently, to test their radar systems on their navy ships. Also, to operation test the crew – basically, we fly out where we want, and the crew needs to be ready to essentially track us and immediately formulate a response.”
Oklahoma’s rich history in space exploration played a significant role in the team’s decision to partner with the Oklahoma Air and Space Port. “The state of Oklahoma has a long-standing heritage with aerospace and the aerospace industry, so it’s more than fitting that something like this could happen right here in the state of Oklahoma,” said Huijsman.
The partnership is also expected to contribute to a rise in jobs for the area. “There’s going to be an operating crew. There’s going to be a support team as the payload processing happens, so as these commercial customers are going to be taking things off and on, there’s going to be jobs. There will be a lot of permanent jobs, different temporary jobs that will be associated with the development of this,” said Ardies. “At the very beginning, they were talking about a team of eight to 10 that will be operating this on a day-to-day basis.”
“I can’t say what will happen in the future, but I can say that we already have a lot of interesting customers,” said Huijsman. “What happens in long term, that’s difficult for me to answer right now, but wherever there’s business, there’s definitely jobs, so that relationship holds here as well.”
The Oklahoma Air and Space Port and the Department of Aerospace and Aeronautics expressed excitement for the 2027 flight. “The most disappointing thing I learned about Dawn was I couldn’t fly it myself, but you know, hey, maybe that’s to come in iteration 3, 4, or 5. Who knows?” said Ardies. “And I say that jokingly, because I am very excited about what Dawn Aerospace means to the state of Oklahoma, what it means for putting us on the map.”
The team from Dawn Aerospace also shared their enthusiasm for the future and the partnership. “Let’s make history together,” said Huijsman, “and let’s make this happen.”