AI, ex-Soviet engineers, and the Holy Grail of rocketry: Inside the bold bet to rival SpaceX

The aerospace startup Aspire is designing a fully reusable rocket that could make launches cheaper. It might just beat Elon Musk at his own game.

“The engine that we have now could have probably taken seven years and up to half a billion dollars,” Stan Rudenko tells me over a video call from Abu Dhabi. “In our collaboration, it basically took half a year . . . and we already have a first version. It’s mind-blowing.”

Rudenko is the CEO of Aspire Space Technologies, and the collaboration he’s talking about is with Leap 71, a Dubai-based computational engineering startup founded by the aerospace engineer Josefine Lissner and the entrepreneur Lin Kayser. They have formed an almost sci-fi alliance: A team staffed by the........

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