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Firefly Aerospace Discussion Thread


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  • 2 months later...
59 minutes ago, tater said:

 

She left SpaceX to work at BO not that long ago (a year?)... guess it was not so awesome there.

I think that you are going to see more people migrating to these smaller companies as they plainly have a better work environment, eg. not run by sociopaths.

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42 minutes ago, SpaceFace545 said:

I think that you are going to see more people migrating to these smaller companies as they plainly have a better work environment, eg. not run by sociopaths.

She's joining a startup.

She will be working more like SpaceX, less like BO—but she'll have a stake in it, and she'll actually work for a company trying to get things done.

 

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15 minutes ago, RyanRising said:

I would like to know why we saw the boron shenanigans' signature at the end of the burn as well as the beginning. Perhaps they just wanted to get the stuff out of the rocket?

Since they then announced the Sept 2 launch date, I assume it was intentional? A purge as you suggest?

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https://spacenews.com/firefly-aerospaces-alpha-rocket-ready-for-first-launch/

Quote

The company has extensively tested that rocket, including nearly 20 hot-fire tests. “This vehicle has definitely been put through its paces,” he said. “We’re ready to go.”

The rocket could have been ready sooner but for the delayed delivery of a component needed for its flight termination system. Markusic declined to identify the specific component or its supplier, but said it was one of the few major components that the company did not develop in-house.

“The vendor could not get the components qualified and delivered on time,” he said. “We’re a year behind schedule on that flight termination system.”

 

Amazing how all kinds of contracting is the same. One component being behind can really throw a monkey wrench into things.

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Launch window today opens at 6pm Pacific.

Browsing their site, their gamma reusable vehicle concept looks like this:

pic-gamma-main.png

 

pic-gamma-inside.png

Aerospikes for the first stage engines, cross fed vac engine for stage 2.

Air-drop or runway takeoff. 5000kg to LEO (payload in center of cut away with gold foil). Presumably drop either increases that payload, or the 5t is with air drop, and runway is lower.

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4 minutes ago, mikegarrison said:

I'm not a fan of such a sharp shape. That's not good for subsonic flight. But I guess I don't know exactly what they are trying to do with it.

As far as I can tell, it's a spaceplane in the "gas it up on the tarmac, and fly it to space" sense. Presumably since it is not an air breather it turns vertical as quickly as possibly to get to thinner air.

The fuselage is about 33m long. The aerospikes are ~1.75m in dia as a reference. Wingspan is maybe 21m.

 

 

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That thing is bizarre.

They say:

Highly reusable — 75% (by cost) of flight hardware to be recovered and reused in later flights

  • Innovative 2–stage design

Then show both "stages" of engines inside the same vehicle stage. Are they defining a "stage" by engines, not by dropping something? Could the aerospikes along with their associated LOX tanks (look like torpedoes in the cutaway) be ejected out the back when spent? Does it have some sort of drop tank that is 25% of vehicle cost?

Quite odd.

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