See Valve Tech in Action
Take a closer look behind the scenes — from precision manufacturing to rigorous testing — and see what sets our valves apart.
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The V-22 Osprey is a tiltrotor aircraft that combines the vertical takeoff and landing capability of a helicopter with the speed and range of a fixed-wing turboprop plane. Its rotors, mounted on rotating nacelles at the tips of its wings, tilt upward for vertical liftoff and hovering, then rotate forward for efficient horizontal flight — allowing it to reach speeds and distances far beyond traditional helicopters. Jointly developed by Bell and Boeing for the U.S. military, the Osprey is used across the Marine Corps, Navy, and Air Force for troop transport, resupply, and special operations missions where both vertical access and long-range speed are critical.
Themis is Europe's reusable first-stage rocket demonstrator, led by CNES (the French space agency) in partnership with ESA and built by ArianeGroup, designed to test vertical takeoff and vertical landing technology similar to SpaceX's Falcon 9 booster recovery. It's meant to prove out reusability techniques — like precision propulsion control and guided descent — that could feed into Europe's next generation of launch vehicles, with low-altitude hop tests expected in the Spring 2026 timeframe from Esrange Space Center in Sweden.
SpaceShipTwo is Virgin Galactic's suborbital spaceplane, designed to carry passengers and researchers just past the edge of space for a few minutes of weightlessness before gliding back to a runway landing. It launches from beneath a carrier aircraft (WhiteKnightTwo) at high altitude, then ignites its own hybrid rocket motor to climb the rest of the way, using a unique "feathering" wing mechanism for a safe, low-speed reentry. After a long gap following a fatal 2014 test-flight accident and further setbacks, Virgin Galactic has been working to relaunch commercial service, with new tickets priced around $750,000 and flights targeted to resume in 2026.
During Mars atmospheric entry, a spacecraft's attitude control system is critical for keeping the vehicle properly oriented as it plunges through the thin Martian atmosphere at hypersonic speeds — often exceeding 12,000 mph. Small reaction control thrusters fire in precise bursts to maintain the correct entry angle, counteract atmospheric disturbances, and keep the heat shield oriented into the airflow, since even a slight misalignment could cause catastrophic heating or an uncontrolled tumble. As the vehicle decelerates through parachute deployment and, in some cases, powered descent, these valve-controlled thruster systems continue making rapid micro-adjustments, working in concert with onboard guidance computers to ensure a safe, controlled trajectory all the way to touchdown.
The Kawasaki P-1 (often referred to as the KP-1) is a Japanese maritime patrol aircraft developed by Kawasaki Heavy Industries for the Japan Maritime Self-Defense Force. It's notable for being one of the few maritime patrol planes powered by four jet engines rather than turboprops, giving it a higher cruising speed and altitude than older designs like the P-3 Orion, which it was built to replace. Equipped with advanced sonobuoys, radar, and magnetic anomaly detection systems, the P-1 is used for anti-submarine warfare, surveillance, and reconnaissance missions over open water.
The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) is the largest and most powerful space telescope ever built, designed to observe the universe primarily in infrared light, which allows it to peer through cosmic dust and see some of the earliest galaxies formed after the Big Bang. Launched in December 2021 and positioned nearly a million miles from Earth at the Sun-Earth L2 Lagrange point, it features a 6.5-meter gold-coated mirror made of 18 hexagonal segments and a massive multi-layer sunshield to keep its instruments extremely cold. Since becoming operational, it has delivered groundbreaking discoveries about distant exoplanets, star formation, and the early universe, and is operated jointly by NASA, ESA, and the Canadian Space Agency.
The International Space Station (ISS) is a multinational orbiting laboratory that has hosted a continuous human presence since November 2000, serving as a platform for research in microgravity across biology, physics, astronomy, and materials science. It's a joint project between NASA, Roscosmos, ESA, JAXA, and the Canadian Space Agency, orbiting roughly 250 miles above Earth and completing about 16 orbits per day. The station is now in its final years of operation — NASA and its partners plan to deorbit it around 2030, splashing it down in a remote part of the Pacific Ocean, as commercial space stations are developed to take over its role in low Earth orbit.
The H-II was Japan's first domestically developed liquid-fueled launch vehicle, built by Mitsubishi Heavy Industries for JAXA (then NASDA) and first flown in 1994. It was designed to give Japan fully independent heavy-lift launch capability, using an indigenous LE-7 cryogenic main engine and solid rocket boosters, but it was retired in the late 1990s after a couple of high-profile failures drove up costs and reliability concerns. Its lineage continued through the more successful H-IIA and H-IIB rockets, which flew for decades afterward, and today Japan's launch program has moved on to the newer H3 rocket as its primary heavy-lift vehicle.
GRACE (Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment) and its successor GRACE-FO rely on a cold gas propulsion system using gaseous nitrogen to maintain precise formation flying between the twin satellites, which is essential for their gravity-mapping mission. High-pressure nitrogen is stored in onboard tanks and stepped down through a pressure regulation system before reaching the small thrusters — twelve 10-millinewton thrusters for fine attitude control and two 40-millinewton thrusters for orbit adjustments — ensuring each burn is delivered at a consistent, controlled pressure. This precise pressurization control is critical: because GRACE measures the gravitational field by tracking minute changes in the distance between its twin satellites, even small inconsistencies in thrust could introduce noise into the extremely sensitive science data.
NASA's Dawn mission, launched in 2007, was the first spacecraft to orbit two different extraterrestrial bodies — the protoplanet Vesta and the dwarf planet Ceres — both located in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. What made this possible was Dawn's ion propulsion system, which used electrically charged xenon ions to generate thrust far more efficiently than traditional chemical engines, allowing the spacecraft to accelerate gradually over long periods and maneuver between two distinct orbits during a single mission. Dawn revealed that Vesta is a dry, differentiated body resembling a small planet, while Ceres surprised scientists with evidence of water ice and cryovolcanism, before the mission concluded in 2018 when it ran out of hydrazine fuel needed to control its orientation.
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