Spaceflight

The company announced June 9 that its DARK propulsion system, incorporated into a D-Orbit ION vehicle launched in March, has carried out a series of test firings in orbit. Arkadia said the system, featuring a thruster producing five newtons of thrust, performed both hundreds of very short pulses firing for tens of milliseconds at a time as well as longer “steady state” burns of up to five seconds.

Francho Garcia, chief executive and co-founder of Arkadia Space, said in a recent interview that the goal of that test campaign was to compare the performance of the thruster in space to previous ground tests. “What we have found is that it is exactly the same as the ground data,” he said of the thruster’s in-space performance. “It was much better than what we were expecting, honestly.”

The test is a milestone both for Arkadia and for the development of so-called “green” propulsion systems that use non-toxic propellants as an alternative to hydrazine. He said that the company showed the benefits of green propulsion, including easier and less expensive fueling during pre-launch processing, when preparing the ION vehicle for launch on SpaceX’s Transporter-13 mission from Vandenberg Space Force Base.