Space

From the wiki page linked here, this looks like a toroidal spike. I wonder what sort of gas they use for the base bleed.

Several versions of the design exist, differentiated by their shapes. In the toroidal aerospike the spike is bowl-shaped with the exhaust exiting in a ring around the outer rim. In theory this requires an infinitely long spike for best efficiency, but by blowing a small amount of gas out of the center of a shorter truncated spike (like base bleed in an artillery shell), something similar can be achieved.