Arcos

ARCOS is Pangea Aerospace’s flagship aerospike propulsion platform and the company’s core technological breakthrough: the world’s first methane/liquid-oxygen (methalox) aerospike engine successfully built and hot-fire tested. Unlike conventional bell-shaped nozzles, an aerospike nozzle maintains near-optimal expansion efficiency at any altitude or ambient pressure, a concept long pursued in the industry but historically blocked by extreme thermal, structural and manufacturing complexity. Pangea’s success igniting a methalox aerospike proved the concept viable in practice, and ARCOS translates that milestone into a modular, scalable engine architecture whose thrust level, geometry and interface configuration can be adapted to a wide variety of launcher sizes — the second-stage configuration delivers 750 kN of thrust. Key subsystems include an adjustable interface ring for easy integration across stages and vehicle configurations, a modular, deep-throttleable, high-pressure combustion chamber that is bi-material additively manufactured for optimal thermal and structural performance, the aerospike nozzle geometry itself for altitude-adaptive efficiency, and a simple, reliable, well-proven gas-generator open engine cycle. ARCOS is designed for first-stage, second-stage, booster and launcher re-entry/reuse applications, and is already referenced by several launcher programs (Atlas, ITAN, ESPER, ARES, MERLIN and private clients). In January 2026 ARCOS won the European Commission’s Prize for Game-Changing Innovation for European Launchers (EUR 950,000), and Pangea has separately been selected by the European Space Agency to progress ARCOS subsystem validation and a flight-oriented engine architecture through 2026 as part of Europe’s push for reusable-launcher technological sovereignty.