Brunswick’s bluShift Tests New MAREVL Hybrid Engine, Boosts Local Economy

Sascha Deri stood at bluShift Aerospace’s test area on the former Brunswick Naval Air Station on Feb. 23 as his team ran the company’s upgraded MAREVL hybrid engine in a high-powered static test nicknamed "Push It to 11." The company says the effort, conducted at the Brunswick Landing testing area (also described in some reports as Brunswick Executive Airport), was its most powerful engine test to date and will now move into detailed data analysis.

Deri framed the run as part of bluShift’s shift away from purely launching small satellites toward selling biofuel-powered motors to defense and commercial customers. Deri said a $2 million Maine Technology Institute award announced by Gov. Janet Mills last week will enable the company to start buying the infrastructure needed to produce and test the engines, and he told reporters bluShift plans to deliver an engine to its first customer within a year.

Reports conflict on the burn duration; Maine Public said bluShift “fired a new, larger engine for 20 seconds Friday,” while Deri told WGME viewers, “You're going to see our very first attempt at a full-duration burn… That's a 60 second burn of our engine, and it will burn almost all the fuel out. We've never done this before.” Payload described the run as the most powerful test to date and said the operation cost about $40,000, according to Deri. WGME also noted some instability that “needs to be addressed before the engine is space-ready.”

The engine runs on bluShift’s proprietary non-toxic, bio-derived fuel developed at the company’s Brunswick facility. Payload recounts that Deri “stumbled across” the fuel in 2013 on his brother’s farm and that bluShift became the first rocket company to launch using bio-derived fuel when Stardust 1.0 flew to more than 4,000 feet from Loring Air Force Base in January 2021. The company employs about a dozen people, conducts tests with spectators as close as 1,300 feet when safety allows, and operates runs out of a slightly dented RV donated by the Civil Air Patrol, according to reporting.

Deri was cautious about immediate conclusions from the Feb. 23 run, telling Maine Public, “I could see some evidence that we were, perhaps, a little bit fuel rich. Now, that's just my observation. I have to see the data.” He added, “So, what we're going to ultimately see is what the thrust data was, the flow rate of the fuel and the oxidizer and, from that, we can find out whether we were truly more efficient, or not.” WGME said bluShift hopes to conduct another test as soon as sometime in May.

The company is pitching its engines on price and speed to market. Deri said bluShift has “customers who are being told they have to wait over a year just to get a motor” and that rivals charge “anywhere from two to four times as much as we would charge for our engine.” Deri also told reporters, “You could literally take our engine down I-95 and you wouldn’t need a special permit,” highlighting the company’s emphasis on transportability and lower handling requirements compared with traditional solid rocket motors.

For Brunswick and Sagadahoc County, bluShift’s Milestone on Feb. 23 both tightens a niche space cluster at Brunswick Landing and signals a near-term economic step: the MTI award will fund production infrastructure and the company’s timeline calls for customer delivery within a year if follow-up tests and data analysis proceed as planned.