There’s a building in Roswell that looks like any other brick warehouse, except for two things: It features a couple of metal cooling towers that don’t match the rest of the building, and there’s an odd lingering odor nearby — the smell of jet fuel.
Inside the Roswell warehouse is the headquarters, manufacturing floor and testing area for PBS Aerospace, a subsidiary of a Czech Republic-based aerospace company. It specializes in small jet engines, often weighing less than a gallon of milk.
But don’t be fooled by their small size. They’re packed to the brim with propulsive power, capable of producing enough thrust to propel a midsized boat and reaching 100,000 rotations per minute without tearing themselves apart.
“These are jet engines despite them being very small, so it will be 120 to 130 decibels,” Josh Cass, engine systems engineer for PBS Aerospace, said before demonstrating a launch in the facility’s testing cell. “You’ll hear it screaming a little bit.”…