You might not be able to ride it, and it bears no affiliation with the crew of Serenity, but a new vehicle from Firefly Space Systems could change the way we put technology into space. Right now, launching anything bigger than a bread-box into a stable orbit costs a lot of money — not because the payload itself is so heavy it actually requires that investment, but because there were few if any small-scale solutions for orbital launches. Without more efficient solutions, launching a small research satellite can cost almost as much as launching a huge telecom hub, and companies have had to deal with huge expenses and delays in trying to make use of the area surrounding our planet. Thanks to Firefly Alpha, that may be about to change.
Firefly Alpha is a new class of light satellite launch vehicle, capable of lifting 400 kg (~900 lbs) to low earth orbit for just $8-9 million. That might seem like a lot, but if your company is ambitious enough to try working space into its business model, it really ought to be ambitious enough to go after some investment capital as well. A $10 million investment could furnish even a brand-new startup with a network of dedicated relay satellites — 400 kilos can carry a lot of modern micro-sats.
The Alpha uses what’s called an aerospike engine, which naturally compensates for differences in pressure due to altitude. This means it will be able to burn fuel at low altitudes as much as 30% more efficiently than normal engines, and maintain that efficiency as the vehicle climbs and pressure decreases. That’s a big part of Alpha’s ability to cut launch costs — fuel is still the number one impediment to truly large-scale human invasion of space.
Those sorts of cost concerns have meant that up until now smaller companies have pooled their resources for multi-backer launches carrying many payloads. This has the disadvantage of being difficult to organize, and it causes major delays in service roll-outs. With the Firefly Alpha launch vehicle could put the power of space within reach of a much wider array of players, which could have huge effects on the scope of the projects available to startups and other new-comers to various fields.
Not that Firefly are a bunch of newbies, though; with engineers pulled from SpaceX, Virgin Galactic, and the classical aerospace industry, Firefly hopes to come out of the gate and pick up the public credibility Elon Musk and SpaceX have spent so long cultivating. Thanks to Musk’s space startup, private space corporations are roughly credible — but Firefly only needs to botch a single high-profile launch to lose all of the easy credulity they’ve encountered so far.