First Parsec

First Parsec is a Lviv-based aerospace startup that has become one of Ukraine’s more closely watched developers of low-cost pulsejet propulsion. Founded in 2022 by Oleksii Vynokur — whose team relocated to Lviv just days before the full-scale invasion — the company began as a space venture designing a roughly 9.6-tonne-thrust rocket engine for orbital cargo delivery; after that programme stalled, it pivoted to defence and to small pulsejet engines for long-range strike and decoy drones. Its lead product, the SHOOM-20, produces around 20 kg of thrust and has demonstrated roughly 16 to 17 minutes of continuous running in ground tests, with the team targeting up to two hours — enough, they say, for a platform to cover on the order of 700 to 800 km at speeds near 400 km/h. The company puts the unit cost at roughly $750, falling toward $500 at volume, and frames cheap, mass-producible engines as a way to compete with Russian deep-strike output on sheer numbers; it has cited a capacity of around 400 engines a month, scalable toward 1,000.

The engines are being developed alongside First Parsec’s own airframes: the KROOK-1, a long-range strike drone billed as a Ukrainian answer to the Shahed, and the SUETA-1, a target and decoy drone meant to draw out and exhaust enemy air defences. Two further pulsejet models — the smaller SHOOM-7 and a higher-thrust variant in the 40 kg class — are slated to follow, covering lighter and heavier UAV classes. In February 2026 the company received a contract to produce a batch of SHOOM-20 engines for flight testing aboard an unnamed Ukrainian manufacturer’s drone.

First Parsec’s earliest backing was modest — a small charitable injection from a US aerospace entrepreneur, the founder’s own capital, and grants from the state cluster Brave1 — rather than large government procurement. It sits within the same domestic push to break Ukraine’s dependence on imported mini jet engines that has produced rival pulsejet lines from Scopa Industries , with which it has shared technical updates, and KB Nezalezhne , and that Brave1 has been spotlighting through its components events.