It took NASA decades to develop this special rocket engine. AI made it in 3 weeks

Leap 71 designed and 3D printed an aerospike, one of the most elusive rocket engines in history.

An artificial intelligence engineer called Noyron has successfully designed, manufactured, and tested one of the most challenging rocket engines in the aerospace industry: a cryogenic aerospike thruster. Theoretically, the design of aerospike engines maintains high efficiency across a wide range of altitudes, making it ideal for rockets that can go from surface to orbit on a single spaceship. This type of vehicle—called single-stage-to-orbit—is one of the Holy Grails of space exploration because of its efficiency, simplicity, and cost-effectiveness. And—unlike the NASA engineers who spent years designing, manufacturing, and testing an aerospike in the 1990s—this AI effectively made it happen in just minutes.