from the you-can't-take-the-sky-from-me dept.
An interview with former SpaceX Engineer Tom Markusic and a walk around the new Texas headquarters of his company Firefly Space Systems, a private space firm with plans to "democratize access to space".
Ars Technica - Firefly Space Systems charges full-speed toward low Earth orbit
Firefly is a "new space" company, a term that differentiates it and its contemporaries, like SpaceX and Blue Origin, from "old space" stalwarts like Boeing and Lockheed-Martin. "Old space" companies built Apollo and the Space Shuttle and the ISS, but it’s becoming increasingly clear that the ossified "old space" model of multi-decade government contract work and hidebound development and accounting practices doesn’t own access to orbit anymore. We’re entering the "new space" era where small agile companies stand on the shoulders of the slow-moving giants and send not just billion-dollar government payloads and multi-PhD-equipped astronauts into orbit, but cheap small payloads and possibly even tourists.
The article goes on to talk about an evolutionary change in the rocket they are designing.
The design of that rocket is what made Ars gravitate toward exploring Firefly’s story in the first place: rather than walking down more traditional rocketry paths, the Alpha will be constructed from composites and will use a methane-fueled plugged autogenously pressurized aerospike engine.
(Score: -1, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 09 2014, @08:39PM
Will these allow us to cheaply round up and shoot all the niggers, spics and kikes into the sun?
- Ethanol-fueled
(Score: 2) by cmn32480 on Tuesday December 09 2014, @08:44PM
Did you get the banhammer dropped on you again? Usually you log in for shithead stuff like this.
"It's a dog eat dog world, and I'm wearing Milkbone underwear" - Norm Peterson
(Score: -1, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 09 2014, @08:53PM
Go choke on a bucket of dicks.
- Ethanol-fueled
(Score: 2) by Tork on Tuesday December 09 2014, @09:04PM
🏳️🌈 Proud Ally 🏳️🌈
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 09 2014, @09:10PM
He did for years on Slashdot after he got his karma burned up.
(Score: 2) by Tork on Tuesday December 09 2014, @09:23PM
🏳️🌈 Proud Ally 🏳️🌈
(Score: 2) by Hairyfeet on Tuesday December 09 2014, @09:45PM
No he isn't....EF doesn't like the wetbacks, i can't remember him ever saying anything bad about the jews... [instantrimshot.com]
ACs are never seen so don't bother. Always ready to show SJWs for the racists they are.
(Score: 2) by Blackmoore on Tuesday December 09 2014, @10:09PM
AC isn't Ethanol. frankly Ethanol trys harder.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by frojack on Tuesday December 09 2014, @09:07PM
Wow, the first quote in TFS is overloaded with somewhat comical pejoratives of every other project....
Old space = anything that existed before we arrived (NIH)
Ossified = anything we didn't think of
Multi-decade = Hey we just got here, dammit
hidebound accounting practices = we don't intend to ever break even
Agile companies stand on the solders of slow moving giants = we are going to rip off all those guys we just badmouthed
Multi-PhD astronauts = hold my beer and watch this...
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 2) by Jeremiah Cornelius on Tuesday December 09 2014, @09:29PM
So? More reason than methane to stay "upwind" of these guys? ;-)
You're betting on the pantomime horse...
(Score: 2) by Sir Garlon on Tuesday December 09 2014, @09:30PM
Yeah, if arrogance alone could get you to orbit then the author of TFA (or whichever marketing drone spoon-fed him his text) would be a heavy-lift vehicle.
[Sir Garlon] is the marvellest knight that is now living, for he destroyeth many good knights, for he goeth invisible.
(Score: 2) by DECbot on Tuesday December 09 2014, @11:53PM
I'd say it's more of a "that's no moon"-lift vehicle.
cats~$ sudo chown -R us /home/base
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Sir Garlon on Tuesday December 09 2014, @09:36PM
Actually, it's more like we're entering the "new space" era where small agile companies explode their rockets and kill their test pilots and realize, "oh fuck, there's a huge difference between manned spaceflight and a dot-com startup."
[Sir Garlon] is the marvellest knight that is now living, for he destroyeth many good knights, for he goeth invisible.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 10 2014, @04:03PM
Old Space refers to the large traditional government players and their associated megacorporations. New Space refers to the smaller players which have since carved out an existence in niche applications (some of which have now become quite mainstream) such as microsatellites. (Alt Space refers to what you might call "Space Nutters", i.e. people who wish to see humanity expand into and exploit outer space.)
These are perfectly normal terms in the field. Oh, and all three love to hate on each other. :)
(Score: 5, Informative) by gman003 on Tuesday December 09 2014, @09:44PM
Methane as a rocket fuel is one of those "obvious in hindsight" things.
Quite a bit of a rocket's performance is determined by the chemical composition of the exhaust. The ideal exhaust, from an efficiency perspective, is pure hydrogen. The reason is that efficiency is determined by the velocity of the exhaust, and for a given amount of heat, hydrogen is accelerated to the highest velocity.
The most efficient current rockets use liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen, running hydrogen-heavy to give an exhaust of H2O and some H2.
The problems with LH2 are numerous. It's an extreme cryogenic fuel - it needs to be extremely cold, and thus insulated not just from the outside, but from the LOX as well. That insulation is heavy. On top of that, hydrogen is the least dense fuel, so tankage in general is heavier than any other fuel. Oh, and it's rather pricy.
Other fuels are hydrogen-heavy hydrocarbons (RP-1 is mostly linear hydrocarbons), sometimes with nitrogen when you need it to be self-igniting (UDMH is H8N2C2, and is one of the least efficient fuels in common use). They're cheap (well, RP-1 is cheap), and very dense, and good for situations where you need a lot of thrust, but once you're in orbit, absolute thrust doesn't matter, just specific impulse.
Methane is a liquid at much less unreasonable temperatures (so less insulation) and is much denser (so you don't need heavy, massive tanks of it). It has some extra carbon in it, true, but less than any other hydrocarbon, so it acts as an efficient "storage" for hydrogen. You'll lose a bit of specific impulse from that, but not too much. You can also dissolve hydrogen into methane, giving you some of that raw efficiency back. And it's cheap, maybe even cheaper than RP-1, and offers the possibility of refueling in space (methane, being the simplest possible combination of the most-common and fourth-most-common elements in the universe, is not hard to find on other planets).
I don't know who, exactly, started this trend of rockets using methane, but it's starting to take off fast. NASA's doing tests with it (Morpheus), SpaceX is planning to use it for Raptor, and Firefly wants to use it as well.
(Score: 2) by Gaaark on Wednesday December 10 2014, @03:21AM
Wow... no Firefly jokes?
Jayne, go get Vera!
--- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. ---Gaaark 2.0 ---