Dawn Aerospace

Dawn Aerospace is a space transportation company building both in-space propulsion systems and a space launch vehicle. The company currently manufactures satellite propulsion systems with nontoxic propellants, as well as an uncrewed suborbital spaceplane with rapidly reusable flight characteristics. Dawn Aerospace was co-founded in 2017 by Stefan Powell (New Zealand / Netherlands dual citizen), Jeroen Wink (from the Netherlands), James Powell (New Zealand / Netherlands dual citizen), Tobias Knop (Germany), and Robert Werner (Germany). In 2018, Dawn Aerospace raised $3.5m in seed funding from New Zealand, American and Dutch investors. Further investment of an undisclosed figure was made in 2021 by Movac and others. In 2020, Dawn Aerospace successfully performed atmospheric testing of their Dawn MK II spaceplane, verifying its flight characteristics before future 2023 testing of a larger platform. Dawn Aerospace currently produces hardware for small satellites, to include thrusters and propellants. Dawn aerospace has provided the propulsion to Pixxel, an Indian-based space organization. They also have signed contracts with the ESA, contracts with Blue Canyon, now part of Raytheon Technologies, to provide its proprietary mix of propellants for microsatelite operations and ALE Co., Ltd. Japan and UARX Space. In the last case Dawn provided them with its own proprietary propulsion architecture.