Mariana Roe
Joined 2009. Designed the closed-cycle pump that put us into orbit on attempt #4. Holds the only key to the engine handbook.
//01 ASCEND
Ascend.
A founder biography, written in metal and flight. One vehicle, one suit, one life — on a white cyclorama under studio light. Scroll to walk the hardware: every chapter is a different camera focus on the same legacy.
Founder
Avery Cairns
CEO & Chief Engineer
Years
0
2002—present, building
Crew
0
Engineers, machinists, pilots
Status
Mission ready
Stage 4 of 6 complete
//02 FIRST FLIGHT
Where it began.
A garage in Boulder. A welded aluminium ring. A Cessna's piston engine bolted to a steel test stand because that was the only motor she could afford. The first ignition lasted four seconds before the bearing seized — and that four seconds was, she will tell you, the loudest moment of her life. Everything since has been an attempt to hold that sound for longer.
- 2002First test fire — 4 seconds before bearing failure
- 2004Garage becomes a 200 sq ft warehouse on the wrong side of town
- 2007First sub-orbital hop — 12 km, no payload, recovered intact
- 2011First crewed test — she goes up alone, comes down silent
FOCUS / HELMET VISOR
“
I keep the visor closed even on the ground now. The pilots think it's superstition. It isn't. It's the only place quiet enough to hear myself think before the engines light.
— Avery Cairns, EVA-04 pre-flight, 2024//03 CRAFT
What we built.
Thirty-three engines arranged on an octagonal manifold, each one a closed-cycle methane-oxygen turbopump that breathes 650 kg of propellant per second at full throttle. The bells are single-crystal Inconel, machined in-house because no supplier would commit to the tolerances. When the cluster lights, the ground at the pad goes liquid for a half-second before the acoustic suppression catches up.
The vehicle above this cluster is 120 metres of stainless steel, stretched on a mandrel one ring at a time, welded under inert gas, X-rayed seam by seam. We did not buy this. We made this.
0 Vehicle height
0 Engines, methalox
0 Diameter
0 Payload to LEO
//04 LIMIT
What failed.
In June of 2019 a coolant line on Stage 2 ruptured at altitude. The vehicle did not survive the landing burn. Nothing else was lost — the suit was not on board, the crew was on the ground — but a chassis with eleven months of welds in it folded into the Pacific in 14 seconds, and we spent three months and forty thousand engineering hours rebuilding the line, the manifold around it, and the trust in the room.
The glove she wears now has the date stitched into the cuff. 06.19. Not as a memorial. As a reminder that the next failure is already inside the next vehicle, and the only job is to find it before it finds you.
- 2019.06.14Coolant line, Stage 2 — rupture at altitude− vehicle
- 2019.07.02Root-cause review concluded3 months
- 2019.09.18Re-spec: weld every coolant joint, X-ray each one twice+ 40k hr
- 2020.04.01SS-12 returns to flight, lands intactRECOVERED
//05 SUCCESSION
What was passed on.
A vehicle is steel and welds. A company is the people who can rebuild that vehicle in the dark. These are the four engineers who carry the work forward.
Daniel Kha
Joined 2012. Wrote the weld-inspection process used after the 06.19 incident. Rebuilds vehicles in his head before he sleeps.
Sasha Petrov
Joined 2015. Calls every launch from console 4. The voice in the suit's ear from T-minus to splashdown.
Kenji Iwata
Joined 2018. Rebuilt EVA-04 from a sketch into a flight-rated suit in eighteen months. Knows every stitch by name.
//06 REACH
The next ascent.
There is one more vehicle on the floor right now and it is bigger than the one in front of you. If you build engines, fly humans, or write code that holds lives in its hands — we have a console for you.
CAIRNS AEROSPACE · STAGE 4 · PLAINFIELD, NJ