
Firefly Space Systems charges full-speed toward low Earth orbit - necubi
http://arstechnica.com/science/2014/11/firefly-space-systems-charges-full-speed-toward-low-earth-orbit/
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ChuckMcM
This third round of rocketry startups sounds a bit more robust than the first
two, and of course SpaceX is demonstrating an amazing ability to execute their
agenda.

When the big aerospike hoopla over the Regan era NASA Space plane (good
discussion here:
[http://books.google.com/books?id=UaUGpW8M_KMC&pg=PA52#v=onep...](http://books.google.com/books?id=UaUGpW8M_KMC&pg=PA52#v=onepage&q&f=false))
which talked about these engines 20 years ago. It would be super awesome for
them to add another voice to the space 'race' but I'm suspicious about ideas
that keep coming up and keep not actually coming out. That pattern usually
means there is a 'gotcha' in there somewhere that isn't obvious on the
surface.

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32faction
How does one go about starting a space startup? A lot of YC companies are tech
companies where one can go into Ruby on Rails or Java, crank something out
with virtually zero capital, get the hockey stick growth and then it's a
company but with space startups this definitely isn't the case. What would I
need to convince investors?

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jonmrodriguez
You can start making money once you can get a customer's payload into low
earth orbit. You want to achieve this initial revenue as soon as possible, by
making the simplest orbit-capable rocket you possibly can, which would be a
2-stage (probably non-reusable) rocket with 1 engine per stage. An additional
trade-off you can make if your company only wants to carry cargo, not people,
is you could use solid instead of liquid fuel to simplify your rocket at the
expense of danger.

I would start by planning your rocket architecture and your series of
equipment builds, ground tests, and test flights, and leaving plenty of margin
for when things inevitably go wrong (SpaceX's first 3 launches failed, so I
wouldn't assume you yourself can do any better than 3 failed launches before
your first success). Plan out the total cost of all of these builds and tests
(including healthy (2X?) margin on the cost), and plan how much revenue you
can generate once you start having paying customers. Expect to self-fund most
of your initial builds and tests, since I'd guess investors won't believe in
you until you've at least built a working engine. Also always apply to any
possible government-backed competitions or incentive programs that can provide
grant or debt-based financing.

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rgbrenner
Their explanation of why aerospikes aren't used isn't very convincing.. ie:
that they ere worked on in 1969; that nasa already has old rockets in stock;
etc.

There have been new rockets since 1969, yet they didn't include an aerospike
in the design.

Does anyone know: Is this just an experimental idea that hasn't been tested?
Or why aren't these on every new rocket design in the past 40 years?

I mean, the article makes it sound like this is an easy win -- more efficient
at lower altitudes, and only slightly less efficient at higher altitudes.
Makes me think they are leaving something big out of the article.

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lee_ars
> Makes me think they are leaving something big out of the article.

I'm certainly not leaving anything out on purpose!

Speculating, though, I imagine it's a question of risk versus reward. There
have definitely been advances in rocket designs since the 1960s—the RS-25 is a
great example of a more modern high-efficiency, high-performance design (the
MSFC propulsion engineers I interviewed a couple of years ago for my F-1 piece
likened the RS-25 to a Ferrari, while the F-1 is more like a giant Mack
truck).

But developing rocket engines has until relatively recently been the domain of
big aerospace companies on big government contracts, and under those
circumstances it's often far more short-term cost efficient to go with the
sure thing and either use an existing rocket or design one with a conventional
bell nozzle.

Rocketdyne in fact proposed an annular aerospike engine for the space shuttle
when the program was in early development, but the technology wasn't
considered mature and the RS-25 was designed instead.

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avmich
Alpha is going to send 500 kg to orbit, while Beta - "which will likely be
made up of a number of Alpha bodies in parallel staging" \- 1100 kg. Sounds
like a less mass-efficient design?

