A LEG UP TO ORBIT

HyImpulse builds launch vehicles that run on candle wax. That is not a metaphor. The SR75 rocket burns solid paraffin with liquid oxygen, a combination that delivers the performance of liquid rocket fuel without the drama. The non-explosive paraffin-based fuel stores for years, travels like ordinary freight, and needs only a fraction of the infrastructure conventional launchers depend on. Where others require extensive launch infrastructure, HyImpulse needs little more than a launch pad and liquid oxygen.

The company spun out of the German Aerospace Center (DLR) in 2018, founded by engineers who had already set a world altitude record for hybrid rockets as students. In May 2024, their SR75, built to carry payloads of up to 250 kg to an altitude of 200 kilometres, lifted off from the Koonibba Test Range in Australia and came home by parachute. It was the first time that a German company has achieved the lift-off of a commercially viable launch vehicle, on a mission fittingly named Light this Candle. Today more than a hundred people work across Neuenstadt am Kocher, Ottobrunn and Glasgow on what comes next: a second SR75 flight from SaxaVord Spaceport in Scotland, and SL1, an orbital launcher built to carry up to 600 kg into Low Earth Orbit.

Access to space has quietly become critical infrastructure. Weather, climate research, communication, navigation, earth observation: modern life runs on satellites, and Europe still has too few affordable ways of its own to get them there. We think that should change. We also think the change will come from teams like this one.

HyImpulse has never been the loudest name in European launch. While bigger names raised bigger rounds and built conventional rockets, this team took the harder route and developed a propulsion system of their own. Then they did the one thing that separates rocket companies from rocket presentations. They flew, and it worked.

What convinced us just as much is the moment. With a maiden flight behind them and serial production ahead, HyImpulse is in the middle of scaling up: structures, governance, finance, culture, all the things a hundred-person organization suddenly needs. That transition happens to be our home turf. We have scaled an engineering business ourselves, several of us spent years in aerospace at Airbus and on programs from Ariane to the A380, and we know how this industry breathes: in decades, not in quarterly cycles. HyImpulse offered us an observer seat on their advisory board so that exactly this experience has a place at the table. Venture always carries risk. Here, the technology is proven, the market is real, and the fit could hardly be better. So we brought the ladder.

Photos: HyImpulse