All the same, it would extremely suck if legal action resulted in the shuttering of Firefly. Autogenously Pressurized Methane Aerospike Rocket on a Composite Body has a nice ring to it!
Quote from: Darkseraph on 09/12/2016 11:33 amAll the same, it would extremely suck if legal action resulted in the shuttering of Firefly. Autogenously Pressurized Methane Aerospike Rocket on a Composite Body has a nice ring to it! I think they have abandoned methane and autogenous pressurization for RP-1 and helium pressurization. It was mentioned in a recent podcast.
Quote from: ringsider on 09/12/2016 01:12 pmQuote from: Darkseraph on 09/12/2016 11:33 amAll the same, it would extremely suck if legal action resulted in the shuttering of Firefly. Autogenously Pressurized Methane Aerospike Rocket on a Composite Body has a nice ring to it! I think they have abandoned methane and autogenous pressurization for RP-1 and helium pressurization. It was mentioned in a recent podcast.They are still looking into it. Now to what extent? I don't know. But they described it more as a side project while most of the team is working on the RP-1 version. I'm guessing it's an handful of engineers doing analysis and simulations.
Quote from: Davidthefat on 09/12/2016 03:32 pmQuote from: ringsider on 09/12/2016 01:12 pmQuote from: Darkseraph on 09/12/2016 11:33 amAll the same, it would extremely suck if legal action resulted in the shuttering of Firefly. Autogenously Pressurized Methane Aerospike Rocket on a Composite Body has a nice ring to it! I think they have abandoned methane and autogenous pressurization for RP-1 and helium pressurization. It was mentioned in a recent podcast.They are still looking into it. Now to what extent? I don't know. But they described it more as a side project while most of the team is working on the RP-1 version. I'm guessing it's an handful of engineers doing analysis and simulations.Hmm. They said they had gone all RP-1 on this podcast due to some phase change issues in the chamber, also dropped autogenous for helium press, "just like everyone else":-http://theorbitalmechanics.com/show-notes/nexto @ 39m:30s
I really like what Firefly is building so I hope it can keep going if VG ends up owning it by default. Even worse than tabling the whole enterprise would be having it steamrolled under the Branson Bluster Machine (Lock S-Foils in Hype position!).
Quote from: Chilly on 09/12/2016 05:23 pmI really like what Firefly is building so I hope it can keep going if VG ends up owning it by default. Even worse than tabling the whole enterprise would be having it steamrolled under the Branson Bluster Machine (Lock S-Foils in Hype position!).There's no real way that the bolded part works out - if VG takes a majority stake somehow, it would kill Firefly. You don't bust your butt at a startup to make money for somebody else that took you in a lawsuit - you do it for yourself, the people you're working shoulder to shoulder with, and the company you feel a part of. The vitality would quickly drain out of Firefly.
You're assuming they wouldn't provide similar equity and other compensation to the core people (excluding Markusic, who would obviously be gone). If those people are incentivized to stay, and as long as they don't all have deep personal loyalty to Tom Markusic, what's it to them if the majority shareholders change?
Quote from: strangequark on 09/13/2016 01:20 amYou're assuming they wouldn't provide similar equity and other compensation to the core people (excluding Markusic, who would obviously be gone). If those people are incentivized to stay, and as long as they don't all have deep personal loyalty to Tom Markusic, what's it to them if the majority shareholders change?What comes with joining a new team of 3-5 people and building it up to the size of what Firefly is now, is very, very different from joining a ~10 year old company with 250 employees. "Startups" are not all the same thing.
Quote from: savuporo on 09/13/2016 02:19 amQuote from: strangequark on 09/13/2016 01:20 amYou're assuming they wouldn't provide similar equity and other compensation to the core people (excluding Markusic, who would obviously be gone). If those people are incentivized to stay, and as long as they don't all have deep personal loyalty to Tom Markusic, what's it to them if the majority shareholders change?What comes with joining a new team of 3-5 people and building it up to the size of what Firefly is now, is very, very different from joining a ~10 year old company with 250 employees. "Startups" are not all the same thing.Firefly is 140 people. 95% of them didn't join when it was a new team of 3-5 people.
Markusic's company are really pushing the state of the art and it would be a shame if those technologies were obstructed by legal action.
September 27 2016, 14:45 — Salon Jalisco E2 ...IAC-16.D2.7.9KEY TECHNOLOGY DEVELOPMENTS FOR THE FIREFLY ALPHA SMALLLAUNCH VEHICLE – TEST PROGRAMME RESULTS & OUTCOMESAndy Bradford, Firefly Space Systems, United Kingdom
Taken from the IAC conference schedule;QuoteSeptember 27 2016, 14:45 — Salon Jalisco E2 ...IAC-16.D2.7.9KEY TECHNOLOGY DEVELOPMENTS FOR THE FIREFLY ALPHA SMALLLAUNCH VEHICLE – TEST PROGRAMME RESULTS & OUTCOMESAndy Bradford, Firefly Space Systems, United Kingdom Do the smaller IAC talks like this tend to end up on the internet?
Looking at their Youtube page: https://www.youtube.com/user/iafastro/videos, it does seem likely that the talk would be available online. Not certain whether it would be streamed live, but likely to be uploaded after the fact.
Full Mission Duty Cycle Test a Success for Firefly Space SystemsCEDAR PARK, Texas, September 26, 2016Firefly Space Systems, the Texas-based developer of dedicated launch vehicles for the small satellite market, announced today that it has successfully completed over 50 hot fire tests of its combustor, including multiple full mission duty cycle (“MDC”) tests.“These tests of our combustor retire critical engine design risk elements and place Firefly among an elite group of newspace companies that have successfully performed an MDC hot fire on a flight weight combustor. We have shown that our regeneratively cooled engine is capable of withstanding the stresses associated with long duration hot fires,” said Firefly Co-Founder and CEO Dr. Thomas Markusic.