Everyone focuses on the landing when they talk about reusable rockets. For a small team building from scratch, the real bottleneck shows up earlier - in the propellant itself.
The Bottleneck Nobody Talks About
Reusable rockets get discussed like the landing is the hard part. The landing is hard. But for a small, resource-constrained team building from scratch, the bottleneck shows up earlier, in propellant. Most accessible options are either commercially controlled and difficult to source, poorly suited to repeated-use engines, or simply not formulated for the burn characteristics we actually want.
So early on we made a decision that's shaped almost everything since: synthesize our own propellant in-house, rather than design around whatever happens to be available off the shelf.
Why Controlling the Fuel Changes the Design Space
When you can't change your fuel, your engine has to compensate for the fuel's limits. When you control both, you can co-design them against each other. That's the bet behind our in-house propellant synthesis work, paired with an automated production line - industrial IoT sensors for monitoring, automated quality control checkpoints, and redundant safety systems, because propellant manufacturing has very little tolerance for inconsistency.
This approach is slower up front. Building chemistry and automated manufacturing alongside the engine itself means more variables in motion at once, tested out of our setup at Kaunas Makerspace, with JLCPCB supporting the electronics side. We think it pays off later, once we're not waiting on third-party batches or working around someone else's spec sheet.
Structure and Avionics Built for Reuse, Not One Flight
The propulsion program isn't just the engine. We're developing lightweight structural components designed to survive repeated thermal and mechanical cycling - a different target than a single-use rocket, which only needs to survive once. Alongside that, we're building our own avionics stack for control and telemetry, because a reusable vehicle needs a detailed record of what stress it experienced on the last flight if you want any real basis for predicting what it can survive on the next one.
Where This Actually Stands
We're early, and we want to be upfront about that. This is a research and development program, not a flight-proven vehicle. What exists today is a propellant synthesis process we're still refining, a structural design philosophy built around reuse instead of single-flight survival, and an avionics architecture taking shape alongside both. There's real engineering ahead before any of this flies - and we'd rather say that plainly than oversell where we are.