Dawn Aerospace’s Aurora Soars to New Heights in a Game-Changing Test Flight

Dawn Aerospace’s Aurora, a rocket-powered spaceplane that can dance at the edge of space, is 15.7 feet long with a 13-foot wingspan. On July 17 it carried a payload that could change the way we see the sky, reaching Mach 1.03 and 67,000 feet in a test flight that felt like a glimpse into the future.

Aurora’s mission was to carry Scout Space’s Morning Sparrow, a sensor suite to track and photograph satellites in very low Earth orbit (VLEO). These are the satellites that zip by at altitudes too low for traditional spacecraft and too high for conventional planes. Morning Sparrow, a small package with two cameras—one wide-angle, one narrow—takes stereoscopic images to map objects in this tricky region. During the flight it activated at the peak altitude, taking data on VLEO objects while Aurora hung at the boundary where the Earth’s atmosphere thins into space. The images, processed onboard, showed a panoramic view of a domain that’s becoming a crowded playground for governments and private companies alike.

Aurora took off from a conventional runway, propelled by a bi-propellant rocket engine that provides thrust to drive it through the atmosphere. Aurora, unlike traditional rockets, which require special launch pads and weeks of preparation, is an aircraft. It lands, refuels and can fly again in hours. This test showed that rapid turnaround, with the ground crew pulling flight data from Morning Sparrow almost as soon as Aurora’s wheels touched down.

Scout Space, the company behind Morning Sparrow, sees this as the first step towards a new kind of space surveillance. Low-orbit satellites are critical for everything from battlefield comms to disaster response but they’re hard to track. They’re launched quickly, often in constellations, and their orbits decay fast. Morning Sparrow, paired with Aurora’s ability to reach 67,000 feet on demand, gives you a way to keep tabs on these fleeting targets.

For Scout Space, this is a proof of concept. Their partnership with Dawn includes up to 30 more flights, each refining Morning Sparrow’s ability to track VLEO objects. Future missions will go higher and faster, aiming for the Kármán line at 100km, the official edge of space.

Scout is also developing larger sensor systems for geostationary orbits but the Aurora-Morning Sparrow combo is about immediate, tactical awareness. It’s a system that can be deployed in hours to monitor a sudden satellite launch or respond to a crisis.

New Zealand’s open skies and progressive rules played a big part in this. The Tāwhaki National Aerospace Centre, near Christchurch, is the perfect testing ground, with minimal airspace restrictions and support from the New Zealand government’s Trailblazer Aerospace Program. Dawn’s dual HQ in Christchurch and Delft, Netherlands, shows its global ambitions but New Zealand’s permissive environment has been key to Aurora’s development. New Zealand is becoming the quietest hub for aerospace and this is why.
[Source]