An artificial intelligence engineer called Noyron has successfully designed, manufactured, and tested one of the most challenging rocket engines in the aerospace industry: a cryogenic aerospike thruster. Theoretically, the design of aerospike engines maintains high efficiency across a wide range of altitudes, making it ideal for rockets that can go from surface to orbit on a single spaceship. This type of vehicle—called single-stage-to-orbit—is one of the Holy Grails of space exploration because of its efficiency, simplicity, and cost-effectiveness. And—unlike the NASA engineers who spent years designing, manufacturing, and testing an aerospike in the 1990s—this AI effectively made it happen in just minutes.

I spoke with Leap71’s cofounder Lin Kayser about Noyron last October, when he told me that he and his partner Josefine Lissner’s ultimate goal was to create a real world “Jarvis,” the fictional all-purpose engineering AI that works with Tony Stark in the Iron Man movies. Last fall, they had just successfully tested the TKL-5, a 3D-printed, 5-kilonewton rocket engine the company generated using the first version of Noyron. They used all the data they got during the development of the TKL-5 to feed it back to develop Noyron 2.0.

“Most companies would have focused on improving the existing engine, but since our goal is to perfect a computational AI model, we decided on a strategy to broaden the amount of data we would get,” Kayser tells me over email. “If you just test similar designs, similar thrust levels, and the same material, the data and experience you create is relatively narrow.”

To avoid this trap, Lissner suggested they should focus on creating a radically different—and extremely challenging—engine like the aerospike. Unlike the conventional bell-shaped nozzle we are all familiar with, the aerospike channels supersonic exhaust along a cone-like spike that extends outward. The shape tapers toward the back, ensuring that the exhaust gases flow along its surface, expanding naturally. This outer contour adjusts to atmospheric pressure changes and provides superior performance during a spacecraft’s ascent, from sea level to the vacuum of space.

“Traditional engines need a different nozzle length, depending on what altitude they fly,” Kayser tells me. On the ground, engines can make do with a short nozzle, but in the vacuum of space, nozzles must extends very long. “Otherwise the gas........

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