This past Sunday, January 31st, at 21:37 UTC, a small company called bluShift Aerospace, based in Brunswick, Maine, made rocketry history when it launched Stardust 1.0 from the Loring Commerce Centre in Aroostook County in northeastern Maine. This was the first commercial rocket launch in the state of Maine and the first commercial launch using a hybrid bio-derived fuel propellant with a liquid oxidizer.

This very first rocket launch from Maine flew to roughly 5,200 feet — or 1,584 meters — before it returned by parachute. Some of the people in the CosmoQuest community who watched the launch together in our Discord server on Sunday said that Stardust 1.0 looked like a larger version of the Estes model rockets they built as kids, right down to the classic orange parachute.

The Stardust rocket is small, just six meters in length and weighing in at 250 kilograms. Its design and size make it relatively inexpensive to build. Combine that with a fuel that costs less per kilogram than traditional rocket fuel, is completely non-toxic, and has the added benefit of being carbon-neutral, and you have Stardust as an affordable option for students, researchers, and companies that want to conduct experiments in space. Now before you ask, we don’t actually know what their biofuel is made of; it’s proprietary. As more is revealed, we’ll bring you all the answers here on the Daily Space.

bluShift’s goal is to develop a line of rockets powered by bio-derived fuels to launch small satellites into space. They have plans for a second Stardust 1.0 launch in July 2021 that will also be suborbital, and launches will occur every six months or so of future generations of their rockets, culminating with a model called Red Dwarf that will go to polar orbit as early as October 2024.

bluShift’s debut launch payload consisted of a high school experiment and tests on an alloy called nitinol developed by Kellogg Research Labs in Salem, New Hampshire. Nitinol is an alloy that “remembers” its shape, making it useful in medical devices such as stents. It’s also used to protect payloads from vibrations. Kellogg Research Labs is heavily involved in space, and they are trying to get into upcoming missions to the Moon and Mars. The lab’s founder, Joe Kellogg, says that their “long-term goal is to build whole rockets out of nitinol”.

More Information

BBC story

Stardust 1.0 info page (bluShift)

Launch video