Rocket Factory Augsburg Brand Guidelines: An OHB Spin-Off, Helix Engines & RFA ONE

A space group’s side venture in Bavarian Swabia.

Rocket Factory Augsburg, usually shortened to RFA, was set up in 2018 as a corporate spin-off of the Bremen space group OHB, through its subsidiary MT Aerospace Holding, the company says. English Wikipedia names four founders: Jörn Spurmann and Stefan Brieschenk, who went on to run the commercial and operations sides, Hans Steiniger, then chief executive of MT Aerospace, and Marco Fuchs, chief executive of OHB. In 2019, the company says, it became a public limited company, an AG, with Brieschenk and Spurmann joining the board as co-founders.

From the start the pitch was industrial. English Wikipedia quotes its aim to “build rockets just like cars,” and the company’s website still says it uses serial production “just like automotive manufacturing,” with stainless-steel structures and industrial components. Investors named by English Wikipedia include OHB and Apollo Capital Partners; in August 2023 the investment firm KKR also invested, German Wikipedia says.

In March 2021 RFA moved into a new headquarters and factory in Augsburg, English Wikipedia says. The same source places an engine team at the Esrange test site near Kiruna in Sweden and a Portuguese subsidiary in Matosinhos, set up in June 2021, to develop composite structures. The company says its staff come from more than 45 nationalities. Leadership has changed several times: German Wikipedia says Stefan Tweraser led the company from October 2021 and was followed by Indulis Kalnins in April 2025, and on 5 October 2026 RFA named Alexander Dahm, previously chief operating officer of HENSOLDT Sensors, as chief executive. Jean-Jacques Dordain chairs its supervisory board.

RFA ONE: three stages, Helix engines and a Redshift kick stage.

RFA’s rocket is RFA ONE, a three-stage launcher for small satellites, about 30 metres long and 2 metres across, English Wikipedia says. Payload figures vary by orbit and source: English Wikipedia gives up to 1,300 kilograms to polar orbits, while German Wikipedia gives up to 1,600 kilograms to orbits around 400 kilometres high and 1,300 kilograms to a 500-kilometre sun-synchronous orbit with the third stage.

The first stage uses nine Helix engines and the second a vacuum version of the same engine. Helix burns rocket-grade kerosene with liquid oxygen; English Wikipedia says the company redesigned it in 2020 from a gas-generator cycle to an oxygen-rich staged-combustion cycle. To save time, RFA bought early turbopump hardware from the Ukrainian maker Yuzhmash, also known as Pivdenmash, heise online reported in 2024; English Wikipedia says later versions were developed in-house. The third stage, Redshift, is an orbital transfer vehicle with a relightable Fenix engine, meant to place payloads in different orbits on one flight.

Testing has been long. In 2022, the company says, it ran a Helix engine for 74 seconds, and in 2023 it fired a complete upper stage for a full flight duration of 280 seconds. In April 2022 RFA came second in the German Space Agency’s Microlauncher Competition, after Isar Aerospace, which brought development funding and two DLR payload slots on its first flights, according to English Wikipedia and heise online. In 2023 it also unveiled Argo, a proposed cargo capsule for space stations; German Wikipedia says it was not chosen in the first round of ESA’s LEO cargo return service.

How launch companies present themselves.

Launch companies sell something few customers ever see up close, so their public image is built almost entirely from pictures and broadcasts. The familiar set is a rocket standing on its pad at dawn or under floodlights, the long-exposure streak of an ascent across a night sky, and the plume photographed from miles down the coast. Engine test stands supply a second genre: a horizontal or downward jet of fire, usually shot from a safe distance, which stands in for years of engineering that is otherwise invisible.

Factories are shown the other way round. Clean white halls, rows of tank sections, workers in coveralls and cleanroom suits suggest order and repetition rather than drama. Many launches are also accompanied by a mission patch, a small embroidered emblem in the tradition of NASA crew patches, which turns a single flight into something that can be collected and worn.

The countdown livestream has become a format in its own right, with hosts, telemetry overlays and replays of the booster or upper stage. Not every company has worked this way: in April 2016 Inverse described one maker that gave a day’s notice of its flights and published an edited highlights video afterwards, with no live webcast. Coverage now often runs alongside posts from executives on social media, which journalists quote in their reports.

The industry also meets in person. The Space Symposium in Colorado Springs and the International Astronautical Congress, which moves to a different host city each year, are where companies unveil models, sign agreements and show their identities on stands and banners. This guide looks at what can be checked about each company: who founded it, who owns it, what it has flown, and what it says about itself.

A pad in Shetland and a first flight still ahead.

RFA’s first flight was originally planned for the end of 2022 from Andøya in Norway, heise online reported. In January 2023 the company announced exclusive access to Launch Pad Fredo at SaxaVord Spaceport on Unst, in Shetland, English Wikipedia says. In May 2024 it fired first-stage engines there; on 19 August 2024 a static-fire test of the full first stage with all nine engines ended in an anomaly, a fire and an explosion, destroying the stage and damaging the launch mount, English Wikipedia says, and heise online reported that the maiden flight would be delayed again.

Work continued. The UK Civil Aviation Authority granted a launch licence in January 2025, German Wikipedia says, and ESA preselected RFA for its European Launcher Challenge in July 2025. In 2026 the company shipped new first and second stages to SaxaVord and said the causes of the 2024 incident had been understood and resolved, Advanced Television reported in July 2026. A week later the same publication reported that, after a week of tests on the pad, RFA had found an issue requiring investigation and would de-stack the vehicle. In September 2026 the company announced further UK Space Agency support through ESA’s Boost! programme for its SaxaVord ground segment, and its October 2026 announcement still described the maiden flight of RFA ONE as the next goal. RFA has also announced launches from Kourou in French Guiana.

For a design guide, Rocket Factory Augsburg shows how a launch company can build its identity on an industrial promise before its first flight. Compare Isar Aerospace, its fellow German launcher maker of 2018, and Rocket Lab, another small-launch company. For this guide we use a steel grey, a Shetland mist and a kerosene ember with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Rocket Factory Augsburg’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.