Firefly Aviation
BRIGGS, Texas—The new medium-lift rocket being developed by Firefly Aerospace and Northrop Grumman will eventually include a recoverable booster that returns to the launch site in Virginia for reuse.
Firefly has previously indicated that rocket reuse is in the plans for its new rocket (currently known only as the Medium Launch Vehicle (MLV)), but officials revealed new details of the plan during a recent Ars visit to Firefly’s rocket manufacturing facility in rural Central Texas.
“Northrop and Firefly have a similar perspective and that is that for that class of rockets, reusability is a requirement for a lot of reasons,” said Bill Weber, Firefly’s CEO. “Economically, it becomes an advantage because we don’t have to build additional floor space … Likewise, the pricing structure for customers is starting to become super competitive, which we absolutely love, and we’re going to be right in the middle of it.”
Firefly is one of several companies rushing to bring new mid-range rockets to market, all of which will be at least partially reusable. Rocket Lab, perhaps the most dominant company in Firefly’s class, is developing the Neutron rocket while continuing to fly the smaller Electron launcher, which has now accumulated 50 missions. Relativity Space, a well-funded private company based in California, is developing the partially reusable Terran R rocket after abandoning its smaller Terran 1 vehicle after just one test flight. Stoke Space is working on a new rocket design with a reusable booster and upper stage.
All of these launchers are large enough to rival SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket, the current market leader. They will eventually join the U.S. military’s list of launch providers for national security missions, which currently includes only SpaceX, United Launch Alliance, and, most recently, Blue Origin.
Necessary to compete
So far, Firefly has provided few details about its roadmap for rocket reuse. But details revealed to Ars show that the MLV will use a familiar method of recovery.
“For our baseline design, we’re designing around the propulsion landing on return to the launch site,” said Merritt d’Elia, manager of propulsion for the MLV program. “We’ll iterate on all of those things, but fundamentally we’re designing for reusability. Not just designing it, we’re planning to do it.”
Firefly may decide to include an option for landings on ships at sea, as SpaceX is doing with the Falcon 9 and Blue Origin plans to do with its New Glenn rocket. Rocket Lab and Relativity also plan to conduct remote rocket landings. However, D’Elia said that approach is expensive, requires ship maintenance and delays the return of boosters to the launch site for refurbishment.
According to d’Elia, testing of MLV’s booster recovery technology will begin during the rocket’s maiden flight, with Firefly taking control of the thrusters to demonstrate the first stage flip maneuver that returns it to the launch site after separation from MLV’s upper stage.
Weber, Firefly’s CEO, said the company’s goal is to recover a complete MLV booster and reuse it around the rocket’s sixth flight. “As it stands now, that will be somewhere around Flight 6,” he said. “That’s probably when it works well to introduce that capability into flight.”
On the ground, Firefly is designing Miranda engines that can perform multiple burns in a single flight, a capability needed for propulsive landings. Engineers are testing the MLV’s composite structures to ensure they can withstand multiple launches and landings, including the heat of atmospheric reentry.
“If we want to achieve the launch frequency, go as fast as we need to, do it at a reasonable cost and do it in a way that doesn’t cause too much damage to the planet, I don’t know how we can achieve that without reusability,” Weber said.