NAMMO’s ‘Nucleus’ in first launch

On 27 September 2018, Nammo successfully carried out the first launch of Nucleus, a sounding rocket powered by its new hybrid rocket motor. Nucleus was launched from the Andøya Space Centre in Northern Norway, and reached an altitude of 107.4 km. That made it not only the first rocket powered by a Norwegian motor design to cross the Karman line, the commonly recognised border to space, but also the first European hybrid rocket motor to do so in more than 50 years.

The Hybrid Rocket Motor powering the Nucleus has been developed by Nammo at Raufoss in Norway, and could potentially power a whole new generation of smaller European launch vehicles.

Nucleus is a sounding rocket, designed to lift scientific instruments into the upper layers of the atmosphere. The hybrid rocket motor propelling it, however, can be scaled up to lift a wide range of payloads, including small satellites into low earth orbit. “For this specific flight, Nucleus carried 3 technical experiments aloft. The most important one was the ASC/ UiO 4D- SPACE module loaded with its 6 ‘ daughter’ payloads. During flight, the ‘daughters’ were released 2 at a time when the rocket passed 60 km altitude. They measured small-scale plasma structures and transmitted data back to the main 4D-Space module. In addition, we also tested a newly ASC developed pyrotechnical system and an inertial unit (IMU) from Sensonor AS”, said Kolbjørn Blix, Director of Space Systems at Andøya Space Centre.

Nammo is hoping that the new propulsion technology demonstrated with Nucleus will be able to power future launch vehicles for small satellites. “Over the next few years, there are plans to launch thousands of small satellites.” The benefit of our new hybrid rocket motor is they can lift them into orbit with the accuracy of a liquid fueled engine, but without the associated complexity and costs, making it ideal for smaller European launch sites,” stated Onno Verberne, Nammo’s VP of Business Development for space.

Presently, just a select few nations – Russia, India, China, USA, France and Japan – have the capacity to build launch vehicles for satellites and send them into space from home bases. If the technology demonstrated in the Nucleus is successful, Norway has the potential to join them.

The Nucleus rocket is 9 metres long with a total weight of around 800 kg. The motor gives a thrust of 30 KN (3 tons) but planned future version of the engine would give 75100 KN of thrust.