Media tour of Firefly Aerospace

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Firefly did several media events during SXSW last week, and I was fortunate enough to tag along during one. After a lifetime of building model rockets it was really cool to see a hot-fire test for an honest-to-goodness liquid motor. Heck, we were only about 500 feet away!

James
 
I'm sad that the truncated plug cluster is gone, that looked really interesting.

There's a reason it's gone. Aerospikes have their own issues that are so far offsetting any benefits. Had a great convo with some Dynetics guys that came from XCOR about that very thing a couple weeks ago.
 
Cooling issues and efficiency issues in the low mach range seemed to have been overcome at least as far as Lockheed was concerned. They had the segmented Linear Aerospikes designated for use on their X-33 and Venturestar programs. Ah, the fond memories of standing next to the X-33 while explaining to a four star what a benefit the program would be to the military!
 
Cooling issues and efficiency issues in the low mach range seemed to have been overcome at least as far as Lockheed was concerned. They had the segmented Linear Aerospikes designated for use on their X-33 and Venturestar programs. Ah, the fond memories of standing next to the X-33 while explaining to a four star what a benefit the program would be to the military!

Did Firefly ever come knocking for a consult? lol
 
I know from experience on both sides that the newer private spaceflight companies tend to look outside the spheres of the larger aero firms like NGC, LMT, and BA (the established, the elite, the premier, the stodgy, insert your own adjective lol)
 
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