Rebound

Built to
come back

For most people, orbit is still a distant place. We think it should be a routine one. Rebound is developing reusable rockets, and engines designed to fly again without being taken apart, so the time between flights shrinks from weeks to hours.

Ready to see how?

Rebound designs its vehicles around propulsion it develops in-house

From first fire to full reuse

Firstfire L1-D1T · LOX / E85 · CAD geometry · not released for manufacture

Propulsion

Every rocket starts on the ground. Ours starts with Firstfire, a 1.5 kN liquid-oxygen and E85 engine.

A solid copper heat-sink chamber, a drilled copper injector head, metal-seated ports and a spark torch igniter. Its 29.80 mm throat and nozzle were checked with SU2 flow simulation at about 1.54 kN.

It is small on purpose. The first firing is a single 5-second burn from cold, planned to prove the team, the instrumentation and the test process that every larger engine depends on. The design is finished to quote-ready drawings, with its feed system, test stand and firing sequence written out.

Design thrust
1.5 kN
Chamber pressure
18 bar
Propellants
LOX / E85
Mixture ratio
O/F 0.95
Where the engine stands
Rendering of Rebound's two-stage reusable launch vehicle, current design
Current design model · development target

Launch vehicle

Both stages come home.

A two-stage rocket where the booster returns to the launch site and the upper stage delivers its payloads in low Earth orbit, then comes back to be caught by the launch tower.

  1. 017booster engines on a shared engine design
  2. 0217.5 tdesign payload to low Earth orbit
  3. 0383 mtall, 5.05 m diameter, both stages reusable
  4. 04Tower catchupper stage returns to the pad, booster lands back at the launch site
  5. 0524 hrelaunch target for the same vehicle

These are development objectives, not demonstrated performance. Flight design, recovery, turnaround, capacity and price are not yet established.

Cutaway render of the Firstfire engine showing the nozzle, copper chamber, injector head and spark torch

An engine you never open

Engine research · 24-hour turnaround

We're designing our booster engine to fly again without being opened between flights.

Most of the work between a landing and the next launch happens inside the engines. Ours is designed to remove it: a cooler-running chamber built for hundreds of firings, and nothing that comes apart in normal service.

Each engine is split into three swappable modules, each rated in hours and starts like an aircraft engine, so a worn part is replaced without replacing the engine.

The first proof is planned on a 20 kN engine: fired fifty times in a row, never opened in between. It is drawn to build as one printed part of about 25 kg, with its cooling channels, injector and igniter printed in.

Partner on propulsion R&D

We design our engines in software we built for ourselves

Rebound Design Studio

Rules in.
Hardware out.

  1. 01

    Requirements

    Thrust, pressure, propellants and duty, each with units and a source.

  2. 02

    Physics

    Combustion gas from NASA CEA and Cantera sets the throat size.

  3. 03

    Geometry

    The contour becomes native CAD: chamber, throat, nozzle and copper body.

  4. 04

    Analysis

    Heat through a 5 s firing and the 300 s soak, seals included.

  5. 05

    Test data

    Thermocouples check the model. Nothing is quietly tuned to match.

Firstfire L1-D1T section · dimensions from CAD · temperatures are model peaks, shading between them illustrative

Rebound Design Studio is our in-house engineering workbench. It links requirements, physics, native CAD and analysis, and keeps every failed calculation next to the passing ones.

An internal tool, not a product. A passing model check is never treated as hardware that is ready to build.

Progress log

Where we are today: the Firstfire test engine and the 20 kN proof engine are designed and documented. Fabrication and testing are ahead. No engine has been fired and no vehicle has flown.

Engines fueled
by people

Team

Rebound is early. That means the people who join now shape the engines, the vehicle and the company.

Our next priority is specialist propulsion engineering and test experience. If you want to put your talent into hardware that flies again, we'd like to meet you.

Join the team