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.<\/p>\n
Why Oxygen-Rich Staged Combustion Matters<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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 \u2014 Valentin Glushko\u2019s 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\u2019s ESA staged-combustion demonstrator<\/a> ran at sub-scale at the DLR Lampoldshausen facility, and Germany\u2019s Rocket Factory Augsburg fired the first full-scale commercial European staged-combustion engine in 2021<\/a> \u2014 both methalox, both still pre-flight.<\/p>\n In China, the technology has lived almost entirely inside the Academy of Aerospace Liquid Propulsion Technology (AALPT), the CASC institute in Xi\u2019an that developed the oxygen-rich staged-combustion YF-100 engine<\/a> now flying on the Long March 5, 6, 7, and 8 families. AALPT\u2019s commercial offering for private launchers is the open-cycle YF-102 \u2014 lower chamber pressure, lower specific impulse, but easier to build, and currently flying on Space Pioneer\u2019s Tianlong-2 and CAS Space\u2019s Kinetica-2.<\/p>\n Chi, if its test data hold up under flight conditions, would give Chinese commercial launchers access to staged-combustion performance without going through the state propulsion house.<\/p>\n A Company That Appeared Almost Overnight<\/p>\n Mega Engine began operations in early 2024. According to a 2025 conference summary cited by SpaceNews, co-founder Zhang Chenxing \u2014 who holds a PhD from MIT \u2014 told attendees at an April 2025 industry event that the company had completed development and partial testing of its first staged-combustion engine. Roughly a year later, it is logging 1,000-second accumulated runs on a single test article.<\/p>\n That timeline is striking. Building a working oxygen-rich staged-combustion engine from a blank sheet typically takes a decade or more. Mega Engine appears to have done it in under two years.<\/p>\n The company itself offers only that the core team is a group of experts focused on the development of advanced liquid rocket engines. The founding team almost certainly carries direct experience from AALPT or related state institutes in Xi\u2019an. The geography alone is suggestive. So is the technical maturity.<\/p>\n Civil-Military Fusion as Industrial Policy<\/p>\n The pattern is not an accident. Beijing has spent the better part of a decade pushing expertise, intellectual property, and personnel out of state defense-industrial institutions into nominally private commercial ventures. The official term is civil-military fusion, and propulsion is one of its clearest test cases.<\/p>\n
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