ARCA Space Corporation

ARCA Space Corporation (also styled ARCAspace) is a Romanian aerospace company founded in 1999 by Dumitru Popescu (CEO) and headquartered in Râmnicu Vâlcea, Romania, with a period of expanded U.S. operations in Las Cruces, New Mexico, near Spaceport America, between roughly 2014 and 2017.

ARCA has spent over two decades developing a series of rockets, engines and aircraft, including the Haas family of suborbital/orbital launch vehicles, the IAR-111 supersonic rocket plane, the Executor and Venator aerospike rocket engines, the EcoRocket Demonstrator and EcoRocket Heavy orbital launcher concept, and AirStrato unmanned aircraft, alongside contracted composite-structure testing work for the European Space Agency's ExoMars programme.

The company has not achieved an orbital launch despite this long history, and several of its announced test milestones, notably a 2017 'Demonstrator 3' aerospike engine test, were publicly disputed by outside observers as overstated. In November 2017, founder and CEO Dumitru Popescu was arrested in New Mexico and charged with 12 counts of fraud relating to ARCA's U.S. operations; the charges were later dropped, and Popescu relocated the company's operations back to Romania.

In recent years ARCA has diversified into adjacent ventures branded from the same company, including ARCABOARD hover-racing vehicles and an 'AMi' asteroid-mining/exploration concept, alongside continued work on the EcoRocket orbital launcher. ARCA Space remains an active, privately held company operating from Râmnicu Vâlcea, Romania, though it has not reached orbit.