Designed by NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, the Fastrac is intended to demonstrate lower cost in a reusable simple turbopump rocket engine. Fastrac incorporates drastic reductions in the cost of turbomachinery. The engine is started with a hypergolic igniter and uses a gas generator cycle.
Chamber pressure is supplied by a single turbopump.
The only electronics required to operate the engine are the launch vehicle's computer, which only sends commands to open and close valves. The thrust and mixture ratio are set during ground calibration. Regenerative cooling is not used, eliminating hundreds of metres of tediously welded tubing. Instead ablative cooling is provided by layers of silica-phenolic composite material as a liner inside the chamber. The ablative chamber nozzle and the hypergolic ignition cartridge will be replaced after each flight, but the rest of the engine is reusable.