Firefly Aerospace
BRIGGS, Texas — A new medium-lift rocket being developed by Firefly Aerospace and Northrop Grumman will eventually include a recoverable booster that will return it to a launch site in Virginia for reuse.
Firefly has previously hinted that rocket reuse is part of its roadmap for the new rocket (currently known only as the Medium Lift Launch Vehicle, or MLV), but during a recent Ars visit to Firefly’s rocket factory in rural Central Texas, officials revealed new details about the plans.
“Northrop and Firefly have a similar philosophy, which is that reusability is a must for this class of rocket for a number of reasons,” Firefly CEO Bill Weber said. “The economics are favorable because you don’t have to build out any additional floor space. Similarly, the pricing structures for customers are starting to become very competitive, which we’re very happy about and will put us right in the middle of.”
Firefly is one of several companies racing to develop new medium-sized rockets, all of which will be at least partially reusable. Rocket Lab, perhaps the most promising company in the Firefly class, is developing its Neutron rocket while continuing to fly its smaller Electron launcher, which has now flown 50 missions. Relativity Space, a well-funded private California company, is developing the partially reusable Terran R rocket after abandoning its smaller Terran 1 rocket after just one test flight. Stoke Space is working on a new rocket design with a reusable booster and upper stage.
All of these rockets are sized to compete with SpaceX’s current market leader, the Falcon 9 rocket, and will eventually join a growing list of launch providers for the U.S. military for national security missions, a list that currently only includes SpaceX, United Launch Alliance, and most recently, Blue Origin.
Necessary for competition
Firefly has so far provided few details about its rocket reuse roadmap, but details shared with Ars indicate that the MLV will employ a familiar recovery method.
“In our baseline design, we’re designing with a return propulsion landing back to the launch site in mind,” said Merritt D’Elia, MLV program propulsion manager. “We’ll be iterating through all of this, but we’re essentially designing for reusability. We’re not just going to design it, we’re going to do it.”
Firefly may decide to include the option of a downrange landing on a barge at sea, as SpaceX plans to do with its Falcon 9 and Blue Origin plans to do with its New Glenn rocket. Rocket Lab and Relativity also plan to do downrange rocket landings. But D’Elia said this method would be expensive, require maintenance on the barge and delay the time it takes to return the booster to the launch site for repairs.
Testing the MLV’s booster recovery technology will begin with the rocket’s first flight, when Firefly will fire its control thrusters to demonstrate how the first stage can reverse course and return to the launch site after separating from the MLV’s upper stage, D’Elia said.
Firefly CEO Weber said the company’s goal is to fully recover and reuse the MLV booster by the rocket’s sixth flight. “As things stand, that will likely be around the sixth flight,” Weber said. “That’s likely when we’ll have that capability working and be able to put it into flight.”
On the ground, Firefly is designing its Miranda engines to be capable of multiple burns in a single flight, a capability needed for propulsive landings, and engineers are testing the MLV’s composite structure to ensure it can survive multiple launches and landings, including the heat of re-entry into the atmosphere.
“I don’t see how you can meet the pace of launches, go as fast as you need to, do it at a reasonable cost, and do it in a way that doesn’t cause further damage to the Earth in the process, without reusability,” Weber said.
