Magdrive has achieved a major milestone with the successful completion of its first in‑orbit demonstration mission, “Going Rogue.” Launched onboard SpaceX’s Falcon 9 Transporter‑14 mission on June 23rd, 2025, the mission marked the debut of Magdrive’s next‑generation electric thrusters in space.

Hosted on D‑Orbit’s ION “Charismatic Carlus” spacecraft, the mission carried two of our “Rogue” class thrusters into a 612 km sun‑synchronous orbit. The thrusters completed a comprehensive series of commissioning and firing tests, demonstrating successful plasma generation and full end‑to‑end system function.

We were able to capture detailed internal telemetry across multiple firing routines from slow‑shot diagnostics to repeated firing sequences, including capacitor voltages, temperature data, and injector performance, confirming operation and reliability of the power system.

Our talented team of engineers and scientists built five thruster units for the test campaign on an aggressive five‑month timeline to validate new subsystems and seamlessly integrate with D-Orbit’s satellite.

The mission also highlighted areas for improvement; propellant handling, injector mechanics, and how we make in‑orbit firmware updates. These have directly fed into the upgraded designs that we’re now testing in the lab, ready for our next missions.

Crucially, “Going Rogue” confirmed that the core architecture functions exactly as we intended in orbit: charging internal energy stores, delivering high‑voltage pulses to detonate metal propellant into high energy plasma, to generate thrust.

This has enabled Magdrive to secure its first commercial partners, with missions planned later in 2026 and 2027, to demonstrate applications in collision avoidance, satellite rendezvous, and high‑agility manoeuvring.

Besides the technical wins, the mission also sparked plenty of public excitement. We teamed up with London’s Science Museum to run a nationwide contest to design the mission patch, and more than 2,000 young people entered. Now our hardware and the story behind it are on display in the Science Museum’s new space gallery, inspiring the next generation of engineers, scientists, and explorers.

The “Going Rogue” mission represents a defining step in Magdrive’s vision: providing compact, powerful, plasma propulsion to make satellites more agile. Now that we’ve proven our engineering works in orbit, Magdrive is gearing up for real commercial missions and kicking off a new chapter for high‑thrust electric propulsion.