Aquila Engine
Isar Aerospace
Isar Aerospace's LOX/propane regeneratively-cooled rocket engine family powering the Spectrum launch vehicle first and second stages.
Typed specifications2 values
Discloses 1 of 10 fields engineers filter by in this category (category median 3).
- Propellant
- oxygen product page propane
Each value is typed with its unit and measurement condition and cites the datasheet page it was taken from. Nothing is guessed: a field that is absent here has not been published by the manufacturer. machine-extracted ✓ checked by NewSpace Market ✓ manufacturer confirmed by the manufacturer.
As published by the supplier7 lines, in the manufacturer's own wording
- Propellants
- LOX/Propane (LPG)
- Thrust (sea-level)
- ~25 kN per engine
- Configuration
- 9× (first stage), 1× vacuum variant (second stage)
- Cooling
- Regenerative
- Propellant feed
- Turbopump-fed
- Test milestone
- 9-engine cluster static fire (2024)
- Launch vehicle
- Spectrum (Isar Aerospace)
About
Aquila is Isar Aerospace’s proprietary rocket engine, developed in-house at the company’s Munich facility. The engine burns LOX/propane (LPG) using a regenerative cooling cycle and turbopump-fed propellant delivery. Propane was selected as the fuel for several advantages over kerosene: cleaner combustion with less soot formation (important for engine reuse and turbomachinery), slightly higher specific impulse, and wider availability.
The Aquila engine family includes the sea-level variant (nine engines cluster the Spectrum first stage) and a vacuum-optimized variant (single engine for the Spectrum second stage). Each sea-level Aquila engine produces approximately 25 kN of thrust. The engines are manufactured at Isar’s Munich facility and tested at Kiruna, Sweden (suborbital test stand).
Isar conducted a successful full-duration static fire test of the complete Spectrum first stage (9 Aquila engines) in 2024, validating the propulsion cluster ahead of an inaugural orbital launch from Andøya Space Center, Norway. The Aquila engine architecture is designed with future reusability in mind, although Spectrum’s first flights will be expendable.
Documentation
No public datasheet yet — request the datasheet / ICD from the supplier.