India’s First Full-Flow Staged Combustion Engine

Astrobase has unveiled EVEREST, India’s first Full-Flow Staged Combustion (FFSC) rocket engine - an 80-tonne-class, 800 kN engine designed and manufactured in Bengaluru, India. With this achievement, India joins the United States, Russia and China as the fourth country to develop and build an FFSC engine, placing the country among a select group pursuing one of the most advanced liquid rocket propulsion architectures.

EVEREST uses liquid oxygen and methane as propellants and is designed around the FFSC cycle, in which the full flow of both propellants passes through dedicated preburners and turbomachinery before entering the combustion chamber. This architecture enables high efficiency and high chamber pressures, while offering an important advantage for reusable launch systems: deep reusability. The engine is designed for multiple flight cycles, with a 50%–110% throttle range to support precise control and demanding reusable-flight operations.

The unveiling represents an important milestone in Astrobase’s propulsion programme. All major engine components were manufactured by June 2026 and brought together into a fully integrated, full-scale engine. This achievement reflects the company’s focus on rapid development, in-house manufacturing and vertically integrated propulsion engineering.

EVEREST builds on a series of development milestones, including a successful first-attempt sub-scale hot-fire test in September 2025 and subsequent subsystem development and turbomachinery testing.

The programme is now progressing through subsystem testing, including powerhead testing, as Astrobase prepares for full-scale engine hot-fire testing. The next phase will put the integrated propulsion system through increasingly demanding tests, building the data and confidence required to advance toward a reusable launch vehicle.

EVEREST is more than an engine programme - it is a step toward building the propulsion capability and manufacturing infrastructure required for reliable, repeatable and reusable access to space from India.