The Ad Astra Rocket Company Costa Rica is a wholly owned subsidiary of Ad Astra Rocket Company. AARC CR was formed in 2005. The facility has been built approximately 10 km west of the city of Liberia, capital of the province of Guanacaste, on the campus of Earth University. On December 13, 2006, the Costa Rican team generated their first plasma.

• Building a flexible apparatus to explore optimization of a plasma source for VASIMR^® technology,
• Measuring the waste heat load from the source and characterizing its distribution.
• Creating engineering designs to remove the waste heat efficiently.

Ad Astra Aurora Test Platform Mock-up

The above photograph shows the Aurora Platform Mock-up in a deployed configuration. The Aurora Platform Mock-up is located in the Ad Astra Facility near the city of Liberia, Costa Rica. It was designed, built, and assembled by a partnership, led by Ad Astra, which included the Costa Rica Aerospace Alliance (CORAAL) and the National Council for Scientific and Technological Research (CONICIT). The Mock-up was assembled at the Vocational School of Arts and Crafts (COVAO) in the city of Cartago, Costa Rica. The project also involved students and professors from different academic areas of this institution.

The above image shows the fully integrated Aurora Mock-up, including both the platform and the VASIMR^® VF-200 engine. The Aurora is intended to be placed on the International Space Station for performance testing of the VASIMR^® plasma engine and associated technologies.

AARC CR Services

Costa Rica facility is proudly sponsored by: