When Zhang Chenxing, who holds a PhD from MIT, co-founded Mega Engine Technology in Xi’an in early 2024, China’s high-pressure oxygen-rich staged-combustion know-how sat almost entirely inside state propulsion houses — and by May 2026 his startup had logged 1,000 seconds of accumulated test time on a closed-cycle kerolox engine
Publish Date: 2026-05-31 11:21:00
Source Domain: spacedaily.com
Roughly two years after it opened its doors, a Xi’an commercial startup called Mega Engine Technology has announced that a single high-pressure oxygen-rich staged-combustion kerolox engine accumulated 1,000 seconds of run time at rated conditions across its test campaign — the kind of endurance number that until now belonged almost exclusively to engines designed inside China’s state propulsion houses.
The company disclosed the results in a Chinese social media post on May 25, 2026, according to SpaceNews, describing the engine — called Chi, which translates roughly as “blazing” — as having demonstrated rapid startup, stable operation, and intact hardware on post-test inspection. Total program test accumulation across all firings has reached 2,000 seconds.
The performance figures place Chi squarely in the class of engines that matter for reusable medium-lift launchers. Sea-level thrust is reportedly throttleable between 35 and 75 tons, rising to 87 tons in vacuum. Sea-level specific impulse is rated at 302 seconds, climbing to 350 seconds at altitude.
Why Oxygen-Rich Staged Combustion Matters
Staged combustion is hard. The cycle pre-burns a portion of the propellants in a small chamber to drive the turbopump, then injects that hot, oxygen-rich gas into the main combustion chamber where the rest of the fuel completes the burn. The result is higher chamber pressure and meaningfully better specific impulse than the open-cycle gas-generator engines most commercial startups have built.
The catch is metallurgy. Hot, oxygen-rich gas running through turbine blades and manifolds at high pressure tends to set metal on fire. Soviet engineers cracked the problem first — Valentin Glushko’s KB Energomash flew the oxygen-rich staged-combustion RD-253 on Proton in 1965, and the much larger RD-170 family followed in the 1980s. Outside Russia, only a handful of programs have replicated it. Europe’s ESA staged-combustion demonstrator ran at sub-scale at the DLR…
