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Propulsion & Power

Aerospace develops five-thruster water-vapour system

By SpaceEnergy 22 August 2026 1 min read

(SpaceEnergy) The Aerospace Corporation has developed a five-thruster water-vapour propulsion system for CubeSats, evolving hardware previously flown on the AeroCube-10 mission.

The US research organisation said the new design builds on warm-gas water propulsion first developed for the OCSD-A mission in 2015 and redesigned for AeroCube-10 in 2019.

Those earlier systems used a single nozzle. The new architecture expands this to five thrusters, providing four degrees of freedom for spacecraft manoeuvring.

Aerospace has also replaced the previous tank architecture with an additively manufactured aluminium main tank. The manufacturing approach allows tubing to be embedded within the tank structure, simplifying thermal management of the water-vapour propulsion system.

The company said AeroCube-10’s 2019 propulsion system operated reliably in flight, providing the basis for the new multi-thruster configuration.

Details were published through the Small Satellite Conference repository on 22 August ahead of a 25 August presentation in Salt Lake City, Utah.

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