Jeff Foust reports on the new launch company’s first planned product, and wonders if there’s a market for it.
7 thoughts on “Firefly Alpha”
Comments are closed.
Jeff Foust reports on the new launch company’s first planned product, and wonders if there’s a market for it.
Comments are closed.
It’s not a bad idea but I think they’re price point is a bit on the high side. Companies like this need to get in the market early and start earning revenue, otherwise they chew up their seed funding and go out of business before doing anything interesting (which we’ve seen countless times). At nearly $10 mil I think they might have a hard time finding enough business to grow, and I think there’s a pretty big risk of that cost growing.
A couple of their ideas are worthwhile. A simply designed, mass production friendly rocket that can be evolved toward reusability easily. However, given that their vehicle is only 1/6th the cost of a full Falcon 9 launch yet has only maybe 1/30th the payload (or the PSLV is less than twice the cost at nearly 10x the payload) it makes you wonder.
The real market has to be people buying launches on these things because it’s a better deal than hitching a ride as a sub-payload on a larger rocket. Given the figures they’ve put out so far I don’t think that’s the case. If they’re lucky enough to survive long enough to get reusability working then things might get more interesting.
The prices SpaceX list are actually higher than anything they’ve been able to charge anyone (except NASA of course), and I wouldn’t be surprised if Firefly are taking a similar tact.
Firefly could offer discounts on economical six-packs.
Agreed. But the market for what needs launching is changing. Largish constellations of smallsats seem to be coming back into vogue and getting beyond the talking stage they were mostly stuck in in the late 90’s. And the definition of “smallsat” keeps being adjusted downward. Firefly may be missing a bet by not emphasizing the utility of its Alpha to put up multiple cubesat-class or cubesat-adjacent birds on a single launch for a single customer.
The SpaceX design influence is obvious, especially the first-stage engine clustering. That clearly makes SpaceX-style first-stage reusability a downstream prospect. These folks bear watching.
On a related matter, the fact that Firefly has a Hawthorne facility is interesting. The fact that all the advertised job openings are in Austin argues that maybe the Hawthorne office is going to repot to Texas. But it would be neat if a Mojave-like community of small entrepreneurial space firms grew up around SpaceX and the Hawthorne Airport.
HQ is definitely Austin.
They probably have a Hawthorne office because Markusic didn’t want to move, and he might want to be able to recruit burned-out SpaceXers from next door.
Win or lose, private investors risking their own money is the way to go.
Their chief selling point is that the small satellite would be the primary payload of a launch, and not have to be piggybacking on a launch of a bigger satellite. If they can get the time from receiving the payload to launching it way down, then they have a potential market.