
Firefly Space Systems - cryptoz
http://www.fireflyspace.com
======
jccooper
Good luck to 'em. But I don't know that I would have picked several never-
flown techniques as the basis for my least-cost rocket. I count at least four:
aerospike nozzle, methane fuel, autogenous pressurization (whatever they mean
by that), and all-composite structure. That would seem to be a path to
spending lots of time and money on research.

To be fair, composites and aerospikes are well-tested, and methane has some
good qualities and no obvious problems as a rocket fuel. (I don't know what
they intend for pressurization; perhaps they want to boil both fuel and
oxidizer to create pressure? Seem like a non-standard technique anyway.) And
it's not like you can buy rocket hardware OTS, so everything you do is a
development project. But none has flown on a real vehicle. Picking one would
be ambitious. Four just seems like compounded risk.

Scaled Composites has had plenty of trouble with their seemingly-simple hybrid
engine. You may think a technology is researched enough or simple enough to
use without much danger, but rocketry is an extreme environment and can hold
lots of surprises at scale and in the margins.

SpaceX, on the other hand, has only done one really revolutionary thing: cost
discipline. Mostly through simplicity. Which is a pretty important
contribution to the world of rocketry. Much more important than any particular
nozzle or engine improvement.

The Firefly Alpha should be a nifty rocket if they can get it flying without
spending too much money--but the history of rocket development doesn't suggest
that'll be easy.

~~~
chucknelson
> autogenous pressurization (whatever they mean by that)

From their Vehicle page:

"Firely's engines are actually self-pressurized (AKA autogenously
pressurized), so that the fuel itself is used to provide the working pressure
for the engine. This simplifies the design and saves weight."

~~~
jccooper
Probably I'm hung up on "Firely's engines are actually self-pressurized". If
they actually mean that, it's some sort of novel system. If they actually mean
self-pressurizing tanks then that's a bit more normal--though I still would
want to know if it's a blowdown system or if they are using some sort of gas
generator (perhaps using heat from the cooling system) for regulated pressure.
Either one requires a reasonably strong tank, but maybe that's not a problem
for a small rocket due to minimum gauge issues.

It's a nice cheap way to go, but still somewhat unusual in launch systems.
More common in upper stages and manuevering thrusters.

------
el_zorro
I'm very skeptical of the market they're targeting. SpaceX used to cover that
same payload capacity with the Falcon 1 [0] rocket, but discontinued it since
no one bought any. Maybe things have changed in the past few years, but I
seriously doubt it. The aerospike engine is interesting since none have been
used commercially before, but if there isn't a market it might as well run on
fairy dust.

Still, I wish them the best. We need more innovation in the space sector, and
I would love to see those engines become more commonplace.

[0]
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falcon_1](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falcon_1)

~~~
andrewtbham
The CEO is a former Space X employee, so I'm sure he's aware. Maybe there was
some opportunity, but Space X wasn't interested in pursuing it.

~~~
el_zorro
Right now, SpaceX can (and does) have access to that limited market by selling
off payload on current launches. It's cheaper to just bootstrap on to an
existing flight than dedicating an entire rocket to a small mission. If and
when the Falcon rockets become reusable, it's very difficult to imagine this
series ever being competitive. SpaceX aims for launch costs of $5-7 million
when they achieve reusability, putting the per-kilo cost somewhere between
$540-700. At that price, these rockets will have to have a total cost of only
$350k to match what SpaceX offers.

These people must either believe that SpaceX won't achieve reusability, or
their rockets will. Maybe a combination of both?

~~~
gus_massa
What bout proving that your crazy ideas about methane were right and be
aquihired by SpaceX to put 72 methane engines in a Falcon9Prime?

~~~
MPSimmons
That would be fun to watch, anyway.

------
imdsm
Can't help but feel like we're on the cusp of a new age of mankind. How long
will it be until space travel really takes off? I feel like we're getting
closer and closer.

We're a part of history, we were the children of the dawn of the digital age,
pushing mankind towards the stars. A hundred years from now, people will look
back and read about us and think how primitive we were to be pushing for space
but how almost nobody actually went to space.

~~~
apalmer
I think the key missing element is a clear commercial driver.

Say we found a fuel source on mars that was so energy rich it could undercut
oil... then yeah that would lead to a radical revolution in human space
exploration.

What we have now as far as i am aware is very little commercial incentive to
really explore space, in this scenario space flight will probably advance very
slowly.

~~~
rglover
I'd argue that commercial incentive is the biggest limiting factor of the
human race. Yes, it costs money to do things but I'm really surprised that we
don't aggressively pursue space travel just on the basis of knowing why we're
here. There's more than enough wealth on the planet to do it, but we're too
concentrated on politics/hoarding.

There's this strange fixation with the ground (I usually attribute this to
fear masquerading as a budget) and what's happening _here_ , but I feel like
there's a lot more out there if we seriously start looking. The kind of stuff
that would eliminate the need for commercial incentive that we can't
necessarily see now.

~~~
ctdonath
_there 's a lot more out there if we seriously start looking_

Not within individual limits of time and scale. The Moon is a couple days
away, but for all we've looked at it seems it's little more than a dead
atmosphere-free rock. The next nearest place to walk is a couple _years_ away.
Both will require hauling an oppressive amount of stuff along to stay there
long enough to achieve anything resembling self-sufficiency. The sheer scale
of time & effort - balanced against payoff of any kind - is vast beyond human
comprehension. _" Space is big. Really big. You just won't believe how vastly,
hugely, mindbogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down
the road to the chemist's, but that's just peanuts to space, listen..."_
[Douglas Adams] Travel time gets a lot longer the farther the destination.
Between Mars and the next place we have any hope of surviving on is a very,
very long distance. I remember when Voyager I was launched: decades later,
we're arguing over whether it actually left the solar system yet. Yeah there's
interesting things out there...but don't underestimate how very, very, very,
very, very far away they are.

Oh sure, look hard enough and we'll find "something interesting", and perhaps
come to grok "why we're here" \- but at enormous cost to those who don't get
to go. Sure you'll find a few people actually willing & capable to make the
trip (stark raving boring as most of it will be, even with a Morale Officer),
but those "orders of magnitude of orders of magnitude" more people needed to
make it happen don't get enough out of their contribution to bother
contributing, and ultimately it's their paychecks that will be "redistributed"
to fund the effort. Firefly Alpha will cost (optimistically!) about US$10M to
launch 1 ton into low orbit, with that cargo assured to return _at least_ $10M
revenue; if not for that payoff, those involved have compelling reasons to
elsewhere route money which provides a good life for some 400 people ... how
much then the human cost of sending a handful of people on a trip which,
beyond a couple nearby rocks, would take a lifetime or far more?

TL;DR - very little of space is close enough and interesting enough to get to
before you're dead.

~~~
deeviant
I don't agree with your line of reasoning.

There are a lot of not only interesting but also commercially viable things
right here in our solar system. We have several huge balls of fuel, each of
which has many orders of magnitude more energy that humanity has harnessed in
our entire history.

There are planets that we can build on and adapt to, or potentially adapt to
us.

There are millions of floating gold mines with more mineral riches than than
exist in the entirety of earth.

Regarding the distances, I don't think they are as big as you are putting them
out to be. If you look at the ratio of how far we need to travel to get
somewhere interesting(moon, mars, comet, etc) over how fast we can travel(
36,000 MPH+) and compare that to the ratio of the European wind powered ships
speed vs a trip to the new world, you'd see that the solar system is not at
all outside of our reach and there are many precedents to speak to humanities
willingness to make sure trips.

~~~
ctdonath
I was responding to a post explicitly discounting "commercially viable"
motivations, contending that discovery alone was enough. So, I ignored the
commercial aspects and observed the logical conclusions of "because it's
there" motivations.

If you can make the trip financially profitable, go for it.

------
rglover
The world is going to change drastically in the next 10-20 years. Side
discussion related to the article: what to focus on? Will web development
still be a thing (I'm doubtful)? If so, what does web development look like in
2024? 2034?

It seems like a lot of engineering energy will go into the design and
manufacturing of the systems that will manage human life in space.

Really curious. What do you see?

~~~
randallsquared
It would be really nice if we were about to get the future as seen from 1965
(space-wise), but I think that's still unlikely. Even if there are as many as
TEN "low cost" orbital rocket companies doing launches by 2024[1], I'm
skeptical that the US will have the legal and organizational flexibility to
allow the level of launches that would make this non-niche. The main obstacles
to the growth of space travel are not technical or economic, but governmental.

I suppose one odd result of 9/11, though, was showing everyone that the
thousands of plane flights every day already have essentially the same
potential issues as allowing unlimited orbital rocket launches.

[1] ...and right now there's, uh, one, doing a few launches per year, I think.

~~~
vdaniuk
Two words only: asteroid mining. This will change the economic parameters of
space travel.

------
unwind
Interesting. I had to surf up Wikipedia's page on
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aerospike_engine](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aerospike_engine)
to learn more about that.

Quite a cool design, if I understood it correctly it switches the big
classical cone-shaped nozzle into a lot of small nozzles nestled against a
central spike, with the surrounding air forming the other half of the (now
virtual) nozzle. Weird and almost magical, what's not to like? :)

~~~
washedup
Yup, pretty much. The traditional engine nozzle can only be optimized for
maximum thrust at one altitude, while the aerospike maintains thrust
efficiency at many altitudes, using as much as 30% less fuel at lower
altitudes. Also, for the aerospike design, it doesn't have to be a series of
small nozzles. The combustion gases can escape the combustion chamber via a
ring. It's more difficult to cool this type of system and adds some weight,
but it is an efficient alternative to the traditional engine nozzle for SSTO
(single-stage-to-orbit) vehicles.

~~~
rbanffy
IIRC, the VentureStar was going to use a linear aerospike. With at least one
combustion chamber on each side, it seems an easier design than a ring.

Their design seem to indicate they may want to pump air through the spike body
to either cool it or as to use it as "bypass" volume in an inverted turbofan-
like design. It's intriguing.

~~~
seanflyon
My understanding is that linear aerospikes require relatively long lines to
average out the inefficiency of the ends.

------
Gravityloss
Note that this is a 400 kg class launch vehicle, so much smaller than a 10
tonne level Falcon 9. Even smaller than a Falcon 1.

Beal Aerospace also tried to bring pressure fed composite launchers in the
nineties, though he used hydrogen peroxide and kerosene:
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beal_Aerospace](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beal_Aerospace)

While methane has the advantage of self-pressurization, it is also about half
the density of kerosene, meaning there will be double the volume for the same
mass, and the pressure vessel will be double the mass. Pressure vessel mass is
proportional to volume and pressure. That's why Beal used very dense fuels,
even when they have less exhaust velocity.

The heavy tank is a worse problem for sea-level launched rockets that need
high engine pressures to reach passable engine exhaust velocities.

The rocket equation shows that exhaust velocity is important to reach high
rocket velocities: delta v = v_exhaust * ln(m_full / m_empty)

In a pressure fed rocket the engine pressure is the tank pressure (minus some
pressure loss in the injector). If you air launched, it might be a bit easier,
since ambient pressure is only a quarter of sea level at 10 km. Airlaunch LLC
tried to use these synergistic technologies some years ago:
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AirLaunch](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AirLaunch)

Basically in the atmosphere you exhaust at ambient pressure (or not very far
from it). If your chamber pressure is low, then you can't expand much before
you're at ambient at sea level. Thus the nozzle can't produce much thrust for
the propellant flow. The upshot is that low pressure rockets suck at low
altitudes.

But for relatively small rockets it might work well: apparently because of
some minimum-gauge issues, they need to have pretty thick walls anyway so
going to pressure fed is not such a huge overhead. Also equipment like
turbopumps does not scale well at the low end. (I haven't studies this in
detail though.)

Armadillo Aerospace has tested oxygen-methane self pressurized rockets years
ago and they are simple and work well. They can also be controlled precisely.
NASA bought one from them and flies it occasionally. I think it is a blow down
pressurized version though (helium is filled directly to the main propellant
tank head spaces for pressurization):
[http://morpheuslander.jsc.nasa.gov/](http://morpheuslander.jsc.nasa.gov/)

So auto-pressurization is nothing fancy, in fact it can be seen as a simpler
version of blowdown pressurization, which is simpler than regulated
pressurization.

If I had to create an orbital launcher with minimum capital, this is a
reasonable design, though I'm skeptical about the aerospike.

To convince me, they need to first fly some sounding rockets.

There's been many rocket startups in the recent decades, with little flying
hardware, and even that has been no guarantee of going further.

~~~
hcarvalhoalves
Maybe the choice of methane is because it's renewable? They might be betting
on that to keep the costs low in the long-term.

~~~
Gravityloss
The propellants are such a small part of launch costs that they can
practically be ignored.

Helium probably costs more than all the other stuff combined, and they might
be able to forgo that here though, or at least significantly limit usage if
they only use it for pressurizing the oxygen tank.

~~~
saganus
What is the biggest cost of a launch then?

I am genuinely curious. I would've have thought that the amount of special-
purpose propellant would be the biggest factor.

~~~
theothermkn
Propellant, in the form of liquid oxygen and kerosene, is about as expensive
as milk. For a vehicle with 2% mass fraction, and assuming that the entire
vehicle is fuel in order to place an upper bound on fuel costs, that's 49
parts fuel to 1 part payload, by mass. If fuel and oxidizer are roughly the
density of water, then each gallon weighs less than 8 lbs. (Closer to 5 or 6
for kerosene, and about 9 or 10 for oxygen.) This gives us about 6 gallons of
propellant for each pound of mass, for a cost of about $22.

The fuel cost to launch something into orbit is about $22/lb. The rest of the
$1e3 to $1e4 per pound is engineering and paperwork. A typical aerospace part
that has, for example, $700-$800 worth of actual materials and labor will have
a verification and paper trail that costs about $30e3 to produce, due to the
mission-critical nature of all the highly stressed and low-factor-of-safety
parts. (Car parts have an FS in excess of 2.5, for example, and aerospace
parts are typically 1.1-1.2.)

~~~
AnthonyMouse
That would seem to imply that mass production could reduce costs dramatically.

~~~
Solarsail
Many people have suggested as much. The issue then is finding a large enough
volume of customers / missions to make use of frequent flights. I've also
heard (tho I don't have a link ready) that past 50 - 100 flights per year on a
given vehicle, some more exotic methods of flight into orbit (that have been
impractical to date) become cost effective compared to expendables. Not a few
studies have suggested reusable chemical rockets are cheaper than expendables,
if you can fit at least 50 flights a year on them. I once read that number as
around 70 a year for the Shuttle (possibly from Antonio Elias, maybe someone
else). If you can manage hundreds, some of the really nifty / whacky launch
concepts might become viable, like cannon launch, laser launch etc. etc.

[http://www.fourmilab.ch/documents/rocketaday.html](http://www.fourmilab.ch/documents/rocketaday.html)

(I think Antonio Elias, on NSF made the argument that Kistler's now defunct K1
(COTS contract, along side SpaceX) rocket would have been viable at nearly the
lowest possible launch rate for a reuseable, far sooner than the Shuttle.)

------
programmer_dude
Why not use the ISRO PSLV:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polar_Satellite_Launch_Vehicle](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polar_Satellite_Launch_Vehicle)
for doing this? It is a proven launch vehicle and would in the end be cheaper
than anything that can be built in the US.

~~~
InclinedPlane
I don't think the PSLV actually falls in their market. It has a payload almost
10x what the Firefly alpha would offer, and it has a $15 million price tag.
Frankly, if the Firefly alpha is offered at anything other than single digit
millions of dollars per launch it will not be commercially viable. I think the
company is aware of that and that has driven the design of the rocket. The
Firefly alpha is an enormously simple rocket, and is theoretically designed
for ease of manufacture. It also uses incredibly inexpensive fuels which are
easy to store.

~~~
swatkat
ISRO was/is developing a smaller variant of PSLV called PSLV-3S. It is a three
stage variant of the regular four stage PSLV (they removed 2nd stage, and
strap-on boosters). PSLV-3S payload capacity is 550KG to LEO. However, I don't
know about latest developments on it.

------
erydo
My first thought was to enumerate the red flags I see (since there have been a
fair number of investor-bait non-serious "space startups"):

The team comprises CEO, CFO, COO, and VP-BizDev…no engineers, at least in the
leadership. To be fair, the COO does have a BS in Physics and almost got a PhD
in AE.

No photographs of any facilities, testing equipment, or anything short of 3D
mockups. The name is based on a sci-fi TV show and the splash page is also a
sci-fi quote.

Looking deeper, however, it looks like they've recently hired their 25th
employee (a Systems Engineer) and are building out their engineering team
aggressively. Recently funded in January. So perhaps they are legitimately
worth keeping an eye on.

~~~
timsally
> The team comprises CEO, CFO, COO, and VP-BizDev…no engineers, at least in
> the leadership.

Huh? The CEO has a PhD in Mechanical and Aerospace engineering from Princeton
and was a Principle Propulsion Engineer at SpaceX, Senior Systems Engineer at
Blue Origin, and the VP of Propulsion at Virgin Galactic. Put another way,
he's been a key engineer at all the major private space companies...

------
jordan0day
So what is the market for small satellites? Is it just the companies that have
existing (big) satellites needing to replace them? And now with
miniaturization, it's possible to replace them with smaller, cheaper-to-launch
versions?

Or is this meant to provide alternatives for other sectors? If I wanted to
build a new cell phone network, would it be potentially cheaper to launch a
bunch of small satellites than build out the ground infrastructure (towers)?
Even though a satellite in LEO is significantly farther away than the average
cellphone tower, would it work because line-of-sight is improved?

~~~
ep103
Last time I checked (5 years ago), small satellites were a _booming_ industry,
but also a very amateur / research oriented one. While a professional military
or communications organization may launch a number of small satellites, they
tend to go through the same process as when they're building a large one. As
such, most of the small sat world is focused on amateurs launching small
satellites of their own design, student organizations and startups launching
1U type boxes, and research efforts for which a tiny box is sufficient.

As for your second question, a few points:

1) yes, it is massively cheaper to give your nation cell coverage via
satellite as opposed to via tower. There have been a number of success stories
in Africa where a local government / business managed to put together the
funds to buy a communications satellite, and overnight, the entire country has
cell phones.

2) No, you wouldn't do this via a small sat, you'd need a real deal
communications satellite to achieve this. One of the key features of small
sats is that they are small enough that if you beg and plead enough to the
powers that be, you might find room on a launch vehicle to launch your tiny
satellite in some spare room. If this service can open that up to people who
don't have governmental / educational connections, all the better.

3) There is research on creating swarms of small satellites that can
communicate and act like one giant one. That's pretty cool. I worked with
these guys
[http://www.spacecraftresearch.com/blog/?page_id=260](http://www.spacecraftresearch.com/blog/?page_id=260)
for a time, and they were working on setting up satellites that were so small,
they couldn't even fit a real antenna on them, but figuring out basically a
radio based encoding pattern so that you could pull their signal out from
beneath the noise floor anyway.

That all said, the industry is dominated that way because of the difficulty of
launching a satellite to begin with. If you can make it easier to launch sats
of any type, then people will start building those too. Build it, and they
will come.

~~~
grkvlt
> There have been a number of success stories in Africa where a local
> government / business managed to put together the funds to buy a
> communications satellite, and overnight, the entire country has cell phones.

Really? That doesn't seem likely at all. You can either put the satellites in
LEO and you need a hugely expensive constellation, or in GEO and you need a
dish not a mobile phone. The best use case for satellite is probably backhaul,
rather than cell tower replacement.

------
dshankar
I sincerely hope these folks get customers & funding to pursue this as it will
only help grow the nascent industry.

I'm perplexed by the economics, however. A Falcon 9 v1.1 can do 13K kilos to
LEO for $56MM. A Firefly Alpha can do 400 kilos to LEO for $9MM.

That's $5,000/kilo to LEO for SpaceX and $22,000/kilo for Firefly.

Also worth noting SpaceX tried for a small launcher first (Falcon 1) but moved
on to larger payloads due to the lack of a market for small payload launches.

~~~
ericd
That seems to match intuition - that there are large fixed costs involved in
making a rocket of any size that can reach LEO, and that scaling up the
payload wouldn't necessarily increase the R&D and other fixed costs
proportionally.

Then again, with increased size potentially comes nonlinearly increasing
complexity requirements - multiple stages, more exotic fuels/engines, more
parts to coordinate, etc. But I'm guessing LEO with these sorts of payload
sizes isn't demanding enough to cause the complexity to overwhelm the fixed
costs.

------
clebio
Their logo looks awkwardly similar to that of the fictional insurgent group in
the game Last of Us:
[http://img2.wikia.nocookie.net/__cb20130825005729/thelastofu...](http://img2.wikia.nocookie.net/__cb20130825005729/thelastofus/images/f/f7/Firefly_logo.png)

------
antubbs
I don't think it is accurate to suggest that this company is competing with
SpaceX. It is accurate that SpaceX is trying to provide lower-cost launch
capability and it is accurate that SpaceX is trying to make parts of its
launch vehicles and spacecraft reusable.

With that said, the addressable markets for the two companies are vastly
different. Firefly is targeting the <1000kg payload market, with the
hypothetical initial launch vehicle targeting <400kg. The Falcon 9 is designed
for an order of magnitude more payload, with upcoming vehicles targeting an
even greater capability.

So, at this stage there may be a small amount of talent competition (at ~25
employees) and hypothetically it could provide competition for secondary
payload capabilities in the future if things work out.

~~~
jccooper
Or they could scale up once they prove their ability to fly... just like
SpaceX did with the Falcon 1. Which, granted, had more payload capacity that
the Firefly Alpha is designed for. But they could follow a similar plan.

There may be some money in the small launch market. But physics is not kind to
small rockets.

~~~
thisjepisje
Not sure if I understand you correctly, but:

 _> But physics is not kind to small rockets._

Why start with a small rocket, then?

~~~
jccooper
Because limited funding is not kind to large rockets.

------
sand500
If their Aerospike engine is anything like the one in Kerbal Space Program,
this should be good.

------
restlessdesign
It’s great that this may help lower costs for putting smaller/personal
satellites up, but I also worry that this will only exacerbate our current
space debris problem =[

------
api
My first major was aerospace, then I switched. Starting to wonder if I made a
mistake.

I was told back then (late 90s) that there were no jobs doing anything non-
military, and that the only thing I could possibly do if I wanted to work on
anything cutting-edge was to work on weapons systems.

------
cwt
They need to change their highlight color. It is impossible to read text that
is highlighted.

------
dojomouse
I hope the roadmap for these guys includes controlled descent and landing for
the rockets - otherwise they haven't got a snowballs chance against SpaceX.
The aerospike dependence on aerodynamics implies it will be much less
effective when running in reverse for the landing phase - better have a way
around this. When you look at the breakdown of fuel cost vs vehicle cost, it's
obvious that reusable rockets will win so resoundingly that everything else
will probably fall by the wayside.

~~~
Solarsail
I'm not so sure the economics works so well for reusables. Flying a reuseable
LV requires (as far as anybody's managed, we'll see with SpaceX) far more work
than just fuel & go. Typically you'd need a lot of maintenance work and
repairs between each flight, not to mention the added complexity to the
vehicle required for recovery. That's largely why the Shuttle wound up pushing
a billion per launch, instead of the $10 million initially targeted, or the
$110 million marginal cost of a launch.

~~~
dojomouse
It depends heavily on the level of refurbishment required between flights;
agreed. I don't think there's enough examples to say "typically". The shuttle
didn't come close to targets, but SpaceX seem to be progressing pretty well.

At the very least, a new orbital launch venture which is existentially
dependent on SpaceX _failing_ to achieve something that they're very well on
track to achieving seems pretty commercially risky... and that's in the
already highly commercially risky domain of space launch in general :-)

------
tanglesome
Nice idea and good luck to them, but all we really have is a video and a
notion.

------
jdfellow
Midbulk transport, standard radion-accelerator core, classcode 03-K64 ---
Firefly.

Just had to.

------
pinkskip
More power to Firefly and more power to private space exploration!

------
esw
It looks like they've completely ripped off the Tesla Motors logo.

~~~
josefresco
It's not a complete rip-off, but does have a similar shape:

[http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/6/68/Tesla_Mo...](http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/6/68/Tesla_Motors_logo.svg/346px-
Tesla_Motors_logo.svg.png)

~~~
esw
I was actually referring to the font, but now that you mention it, the graphic
is very similar too.

~~~
josefresco
You're right, when you combine the two the criticism is valid.

------
motoboi
The choose a bad name, as the /r/firefly is already taken ;)

------
jdc0589
If they don't have a vehicle named "Serenity" at some point we are going to
have a serious problem.

~~~
x1798DE
I'm shocked that their lawyers even let them call their space company
"Firefly". It's probably a sufficiently different field that they could win a
trademark case at trial, but I'm not sure it's 100% cut-and-dry. I think
naming a ship "Serenity" without securing some sort of licensing rights might
be inviting trouble.

~~~
jahewson
You shouldn't be. There are 185 trademarks for "Firefly" in the USPTO database
[1]. Fox don't own any of them, but even if they did it would only apply to
specific goods or services such as publishing fiction and merchandise, not
launching rockets.

That said, I doubt one could call such a company "Harry Potter's Wizardly
Rockets" without receiving a lawsuit, but I suspect such claims would be based
on copyright.

1\.
[http://tmsearch.uspto.gov/bin/showfield?f=toc&state=4804%3A4...](http://tmsearch.uspto.gov/bin/showfield?f=toc&state=4804%3A4yw70q.1.1&p_search=searchss&p_L=50&BackReference=&p_plural=yes&p_s_PARA1=live&p_tagrepl%7E%3A=PARA1%24LD&expr=PARA1+AND+PARA2&p_s_PARA2=Firefly&p_tagrepl%7E%3A=PARA2%24COMB&p_op_ALL=AND&a_default=search&a_search=Submit+Query&a_search=Submit+Query)

~~~
x1798DE
Obviously. My point was that a show about a spaceship and a company that
launches spaceships are close enough that you could imagine it was some kind
of marketing tie-in. It's just plausible enough that it wouldn't necessarily
be thrown out as absurd, and that's usually enough to scare off most startups
(since going to court over it would be much more detrimental to the small
startup than to 20th Century Fox).

I can imagine they'd want to tread lightly and not name one of their
_spaceships_ after a _spaceship_ on the show Firefly.

