LEAP 71 and The Exploration Company Partner for Five Years to Design Rocket Engines With AI

A New Era in Rocket Engine Design

The space industry is undergoing a fundamental shift — and LEAP 71 and The Exploration Company just made it official. The two companies have formalized a five-year renewable partnership that will see AI computational engineering replace traditional manual design workflows for rocket propulsion systems.

What Noyron RP Brings to the Table

LEAP 71's Noyron RP platform is what's called a Large Computational Engineering Model. It embeds physical laws, engineering principles, manufacturing constraints, and test-derived feedback into one unified design system. Instead of engineers spending months manually designing components, Noyron translates high-level performance targets directly into production-ready component geometries.

As Josefine Lissner, Co-Founder and CEO of LEAP 71, explained: 'Most space companies still rely on labor-intensive geometric design workflows. Noyron enables engineers to adopt a code-first, high-level approach. Over the past two years, we have validated Noyron RP by hot-firing different rocket engine architectures at a cadence of weeks.'

Why This Matters for The Exploration Company

TEC is building an ambitious portfolio of space hardware: Nyx (a reusable orbital resupply capsule), Typhoon (a high-thrust engine based on full-flow staged combustion architecture), and now a partnership that will streamline propulsion component design across that entire lineup.

Hélène Huby, Founder and CEO of TEC, said: 'TEC was founded on agility, building and testing fast while staying rigorous on engineering validation. We have been working with LEAP 71 since 2023 and are now taking the next step. The goal is to broaden the design space we can explore and support faster iteration across successive test campaigns.'

Already Proven in Practice

This isn't theoretical. LEAP 71 has already demonstrated the approach works. Working with Shanghai-based HBD, the company produced the XRA-2E5 — a 200 kN aerospike rocket engine printed as a single-piece Inconel 718 structure in a continuous 289-hour build using the Noyron computational model.

Earlier, an Aconity3D single-piece copper alloy aerospike engine, also generated using LEAP 71's AI-based design system, succeeded on its first hot-fire test — concrete evidence that monolithic 3D printed rocket engines can withstand real combustion conditions.

The Bigger Picture

The LEAP 71–TEC agreement reflects a strategic shift unfolding across the space industry: replacing slow, labor-heavy propulsion development workflows with software-driven, computationally generated design approaches.

Rather than adopting Noyron RP as a standalone tool, TEC will fold it directly into its existing computational engineering infrastructure, with every resulting design subject to the company's established verification and testing procedures.

The result? Rocket engines designed faster than ever before — not component by component, but generated.