Venus Aerospace is a winner of the 2025 Gizmodo Science Fair for building and testing the world’s first high-thrust Rotating Detonation Rocket Engine (RDRE).
The question
Scientists have speculated about detonating rocket engines for decades—but how would one actually perform outside the lab? And could it represent a breakthrough in rocket propulsion and a new path toward more efficient spaceflight?
The results
Venus Aerospace, founded by a husband and wife team in 2020, pulled off the first test flight of its rocket engine earlier this year. The flight represented a major milestone for high-speed flight technology and brought the world one step closer to achieving commercial hypersonic flight.
On May 14, the Houston-based startup made history when its engine ignited and propelled a small rocket to an altitude of 4,400 feet (1,340 meters) above the New Mexico desert.
“It’s one thing to have an engine on a test stand, it was roaring and doing all the things it needed to do, but it’s totally different when you go fly that engine,” Sassie Duggleby, co-founder and CEO of Venus Aerospace, told Gizmodo. “It was four years of dreaming…and it was perfect, the launch could not have gone better.”
The engine burned for seven seconds, producing 2,000 pounds of thrust (roughly 907 kilograms) and pushing the rocket to a speed of about 383 miles (616 kilometers) per hour—roughly half the speed of sound. The rocket flew for about 30 seconds before gliding its way down via parachute.
RDRE produces thrust through a series of detonations, combining highly pressurized propellant with an oxidizer inside a combustion chamber. While traditional rocket engines ignite vehicles through exhaust, RDREs are propelled by shockwaves. “For every drop of propellant, we actually extract more energy, so it’s a more efficient combustion,” Duggleby explained.
The detonating engine has no moving parts; the combustion is produced by combining fuel and oxidizer, creating a supersonic wave that spins around its axis to generate pressure. Scientists first theorized about RDRE in the 1960s, performing experimental studies of rotating detonation waves. Today, new technologies such as 3D printing have taken RDREs from theory to reality.
... continue reading