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posted by Fnord666 on Wednesday June 19 2019, @12:01PM   Printer-friendly
from the hope-they-name-it-Serenity dept.

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

One of the questions facing any company as it brings a new rocket to market is what to put on top of the booster. After all, things can sometimes go all explodey with inaugural flights. So the first flight of any rocket typically serves as a demonstration mission, to prove via an actual test flight that all of a company's modeling and ground testing were correct. SpaceX famously put Elon Musk's cherry red Tesla Roadster on the first flight of the Falcon Heavy rocket.

Despite a sometimes whimsical payload, however, first flights demonstrate a number of capabilities to potential customers. (In the case of the Falcon Heavy, the rocket's upper stage performed a six-hour coast in space before re-firing its upper stage-engine to demonstrate the ability to directly inject key satellites into geostationary space for the US military.)

As the Austin, Texas-based rocket company Firefly nears the first flight of its Alpha rocket, the company also faces such a payload decision. It has an (undisclosed) customer for the flight, but the smallsat launcher also has some unused capacity for the mission—the Alpha rocket has about twice as much lift as an existing competitor, Rocket Lab's Electron vehicle.

So on Monday, Firefly announced that it will accept some academic and educational payloads free of charge on the Alpha flight. "We've wanted to do something like this on our first flight from the beginning," Markusic said. The payloads will fly to a 300km circular orbit, with a 97-degree inclination.

The initiative is part of Firefly's efforts to make space more affordable for everyone, said company founder Tom Markusic in an interview with Ars. As part of this DREAM program—that's Dedicated Research and Education Accelerator Mission—the company will accept anything from a child's drawing to college experiments, or even a startup company's CubeSat. Applications will be accepted through the end of June, 2019.

-- submitted from IRC


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  • (Score: 3, Funny) by Runaway1956 on Wednesday June 19 2019, @01:59PM (1 child)

    by Runaway1956 (2926) Subscriber Badge on Wednesday June 19 2019, @01:59PM (#857431) Journal

    Mal?

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  • (Score: 3, Funny) by Gaaark on Wednesday June 19 2019, @08:10PM

    by Gaaark (41) on Wednesday June 19 2019, @08:10PM (#857591) Journal

    Yeah, I'm thinking NEVER start a submission with Firefly...got me all excited for a second. Almost Soyled meself.

    --
    --- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. ---Gaaark 2.0 ---