SKYLEAR Contact

Spaceplanes · Civil & Defence · Est. 2026

The runway is
the launch pad.

SKYLEAR designs and builds single-stage spaceplanes. They take off from an ordinary runway, fly to orbit on one combined-cycle engine, and land ready to fly again.

Explore the fleet Enter the Universe Atlas
ALT118.4km
VEL7.61km/s
T+00:12:44
Scroll to ascend

00 Mission

Aircraft stop at the sky. Rockets are thrown away. We build the machine in between — one vehicle, one engine, runway to orbit and back.

Top speed
0Mach

Orbital velocity: 7.8 km/s at 400 km.

Stages dropped
0stages

Nothing falls into the ocean. Everything flies home.

Turnaround target
0hours

Refuel, inspect and fly again, the way airlines work.

Runway required
0km

Any Code-E airport. No launch tower, no range closure.

01 Fleet

Three airframes.
One architecture.

All three share the same HELIOS-X engine, avionics and thermal protection. Drag to orbit the model, or pick a view. Numbered markers explain each system.

02 Propulsion

HELIOS-X.
Four engines, one flow path.

A precooled turbine carries the vehicle off the runway. Ramjet and scramjet modes take it to Mach 12 on air alone. Then the inlet closes and the same nozzle runs as a hydrogen–oxygen rocket to orbit. Move the slider to fly the ascent.

Mach0.0
ModeTurbo-accelerator
Altitude0 km
Specific impulse—
Oxidiser—

Use arrow keys to change Mach number from 0 to 25.

01 / Precooler

1,000 °C to −150 °C in under 20 ms

Micro-tube heat exchangers, printed in one piece, chill incoming air so the turbine can breathe at Mach 5.

02 / Chamber

Printed GRCop-42 copper

Regeneratively cooled combustion chambers come off a laser-powder-bed printer as one part, with 212 cooling channels inside.

03 / Fuel

Hydrogen now, methane ready

Liquid hydrogen for highest performance. A methalox variant is in design for simpler ground operations.

04 / Control

Throttle 30–110 %

A deep throttle range and fast mode transitions (under 2 s) run under a triplex-redundant engine computer.

A large liquid-fuelled engine hot-fire test on a vertical test stand, with a plume of white steam.
Full-duration hot fire, vertical test stand · Imagery: NASA

03 Foundry

Built like a satellite.
Produced like an aircraft.

A spaceplane only pays off if you can build it at rate. The SKYLEAR Foundry puts design, printing, composites and hot-fire testing in one building, all fed by one digital thread.

A test article mounted in a supersonic wind tunnel test section.

Step 01

Digital twin

Every airframe starts as a physics-true twin, run through 40,000 simulated sorties before any metal is cut.

40k sim sorties / design
A rocket engine with copper-red nozzle and dense plumbing on a processing stand in a clean hangar.

Step 02

Additive propulsion

Chambers, injectors, turbopump housings and precooler cores are printed in-house, which cuts part count by 78%.

−78% part count
Technicians working inside a large aircraft engine inlet duct during assembly.

Step 03

Steered-fibre composites

Robotic tow-steering lays carbon along the load paths, giving wing skins that are 30% lighter with no extra fasteners.

−30% skin mass
A large woven thermal-protection structure in a lab, made of stacked tan fabric rings.

Step 04

Thermal protection

Ceramic-matrix shells and printed ultra-high-temperature tiles survive re-entry at 1,650 °C, flight after flight.

1,650 °C reusable limit
Engineers fitting components to an engine assembly in a high bay.

Step 05

Integration

Pulse-line final assembly on the aircraft model, moving one station every 72 hours.

72 h takt time
A blue-white rotating detonation engine plume firing horizontally inside a test cell.

Step 06

Hot fire & flight test

Every engine is acceptance-fired on site. Every airframe flies a captive-carry and glide campaign before delivery.

100% acceptance fired

Facility

SKYLEAR FoundryMojave, California

Floor area

1.1M ft²Design, print, lay-up, integrate

Test stands

3Up to 450 kN thrust

Target rate

24 / yrAirframes by 2032

04 Missions

One vehicle.
Every kind of sortie.

A winged orbiter landing on a floodlit runway at night.

Civil

Point-to-point & orbital travel

  • Intercontinental hops in under 90 minutes
  • Crew rotation to commercial stations
  • Microgravity research flights
A black high-speed reconnaissance jet in flight against a deep blue sky.

Defence

Responsive space & global reach

  • Satellite deployment on 60-minute notice
  • High-altitude ISR, anywhere on Earth
  • Cargo delivery to contested regions
Green aurora glowing over Earth's night side, seen from low orbit.

Orbital

Logistics & in-space industry

  • 6.5 t up-mass, 4 t down-mass
  • Return of in-space manufactured goods
  • Satellite servicing and inspection

04.1 Point-to-point

Anywhere on Earth in under ninety minutes.

Pick two cities. ASTRA flies a suborbital arc above the atmosphere, so distance matters much less than it does for an airliner.

Great-circle distance
—
Apogee
—
SKYLEAR ASTRA
—
Subsonic airliner
—

— faster, gate to gate

05 Universe Atlas

Map the
known universe.

A live, 3D atlas at seven scales. It starts with every planet at its real position today, then widens to the nearest stars, the Milky Way, the Local Group and the cosmic web, out to the edge of the observable universe.

  • Planets
  • Solar System
  • Heliosphere
  • Stellar neighbourhood
  • Milky Way
  • Local Group
  • Cosmic web
Launch the Atlas

06 Ecosystem

Who we build with.

Spaceflight is a team sport. These are the agencies, manufacturers, labs and foundations whose work SKYLEAR is designed to plug into.

Agencies & defence

  • NASA
  • ESA
  • JAXA
  • UK Space Agency
  • DARPA
  • AFRL
  • SpaceWERX
  • Defense Innovation Unit

Industry

  • ICOMAT
  • Rolls-Royce
  • GE Aerospace
  • Safran
  • Hexcel
  • Toray Advanced Composites
  • Nikon SLM Solutions
  • Siemens Digital Industries
  • NVIDIA Omniverse
  • Ansys

Research

  • MIT AeroAstro
  • Caltech GALCIT
  • Purdue Zucrow Labs
  • Georgia Tech AE
  • Cranfield University
  • UQ Hypersonics
  • NASA Langley
  • DLR Institute of Aerodynamics

Foundations

  • XPRIZE Foundation
  • The Planetary Society
  • Space Foundation
  • Brooke Owens Fellowship
  • Matthew Isakowitz Fellowship
  • Smithsonian NASM
  • AIAA
  • Royal Aeronautical Society

These are organisations SKYLEAR plans to approach. Listing a name does not mean it is a partner, sponsor or endorser.

07 Journal

Flight log.

Earth's limb at sunrise, with orange and blue atmospheric bands above the dark planet.

· Flight test

ASTRA-1 completes its first high-speed taxi and rotation

A complex rocket engine powerpack on a test stand, covered in plumbing.

· Propulsion

HELIOS-X passes 600 seconds of ramjet-to-scramjet transition testing

A flat, woven thermal-protection structure laid out on a workshop floor.

· Materials

Our printed UHTC tiles survive 50 re-entry thermal cycles

08 Careers

Build what
flies next.

09 Contact

Talk to the team.

Civil & orbital programs[email protected] Defence & government[email protected] Press[email protected] Careers[email protected]