Firefly Aerospace First Flight 🚀 💥 Airframe Remains

Just after midnight tonight, Firefly will make their second attempt to reach orbit from Vandenberg AFB. They build the largest carbon fiber liquid-fueled rocket out there. Wishing them luck tonight!

Flight 1 suffered an engine shut down 14 seconds after ignition, and after the rocket did an overhead somersault, it was detonated for safety, and raining carbon fiber remains on the coast. I’ll share some photos of an identified external part of the airframe and internal rib (see first comment below).

The Flight 1 video has good explosion tracking.

Co-founder Eric Salwan presented to our Foresight space group, now public:
“There’s over 100 companies right now that are trying to build small launch vehicles… Right now, there’s three companies that have launch vehicles on the pad that haven’t been to orbit yet. There’s us. There’s ABL and Relativity. And we’re all trying to launch in September. So, we have a mini space race going on” — video

I asked about pricing: “Alpha has a commercial price of $15M for 1000kg to LEO, so $15,000/kg to LEO and $24,000/kg to SSO. I can give you a good discount now before our first flight. We are not competing on price with SpaceX Transporter at $5,600/kg. We are about 40-50% less than Virgin Orbit and Rocketlab.” — video

You can buy a piece of the first Firefly in this auction.

Flight 2 details & video feed tonight from Everyday Astronaut.