Tour Firefly Aerospace's Factory and Test Site With Their CEO, Tom Markusic

hi it's me tim dodd the everyday astronaut welcome to firefly aerospace's texas test site just outside of austin texas now i've got something very special for you today i'm going to take you guys through the entire facility check out the reaver engine behind me and ask a ton of questions with their ceo tomer cusick let's get started hey look at this hey tom hey thanks nice to meet you nice to meet you awesome and what are we looking at here this is our reaver engine and it's preparing for the second flight of alpha sweet this is awesome so this is the new engine too yeah we just talked to it every day like just when you lift off i know it's exciting but the party's not over yet [Laughter] what's what's different compared to uh the the first round the first batch this is this is what uh this electrical connector here is what what uh we had a failure in that caused the engine to shut down so this is the power okay that's going to the main valves that opens open the engine okay and we had the pins inside this connector fail which just cut the power off to the main valve and the main valve closed and that's why we we had that engine shut down on the first flight yeah so how did you determine already that the pins kind of had loosened up and everything well we found the whole set of engines that's true yeah so we pulled them all out uh engines one three and four had perfect pins engine two had most of the pins sheared inside the connector yeah wow and it's very obvious from data too that uh we monitor the current going to the engine and we uh monitor the the state of the valve and all that adds up to just simply not getting 28 volts down the line to here which um isn't that crazy of all the literally hundreds of thousands of components it can come down to something as simple as that yeah i was just watching the last uh episode of firefly the the tv series you should watch that and the last episode uh the bounty hunter is there and he's standing next to kaylee next to the engine and he's like a thousand things just take one of them away and the whole thing goes down yeah and i was like yeah i was like i wish i would have watched that episode a little more closely no but that was an epic attempt though i mean for especially for a first oh yeah man but this thing would have gone it was it just wanted to go yeah i could just feel it i i it's i you work with these machines so long intuitively feel that rocket was just like for god's sakes let me go already you know so much testing so much delays and i was just beautiful hop jumped off the pad oh they look they looked very nominal but yeah just a simple thing like it is good you gotta validate even you know your your actual launch pad that the clamps you know all the the umbilicals so many things you validate on that first attempt that are probably you know you can simulate them all day long but until you actually command the rocket to let go you know you just don't know how that stuff's going to go you know yeah it's a huge accomplishment to do that stuff and i got you know a lot of calls afterwards from people who have done this before who are like yep you guys are there you know and you're in a different a different state of existence now by showing that you can do that sort of thing because you can get out because you're right it's just this incredible uh symphony of events that have to happen for all that to come off um at the same time and it was beautiful everything worked well my my fears about the mission really hinged on those hinges and the various mechanisms to release right and um so well even big problems to gnc for you know when three quarter or a quarter of your your control authority to be able to keep going straight up after that you know 15 seconds then for the next minute and a half having three engines control the thing still yeah i heard the call out for engine two out and and you know and it's just like take a step back from the screen you know yeah and uh then yeah like 15 seconds later i'm like sure we just don't have we're just not missing some data here because man it looks pretty good yeah and but then you see it's starting to slow down and and it kind of all adds up but yeah the control part is is definitely impressive and and you know based on that flight i'm i'm pretty certain we have engine out capability if it's at the right time in the trajectory now popping through that max q you know when things get really squirrely no right on the other side of max q um we should have the ability to to lose an engine um and complete missions which is a good good you know resiliency redundancy definitely yeah do you think if you had uh i mean it wouldn't have mattered anyway because you know obviously wouldn't have had the velocity to make it yeah but do you think it would maintain control if you had two axis gimbals because and you guys are still sticking with your one axis gimbal yeah i i don't know i it's it's it's it's possible i don't know but it's a real simplification to have a single axis gimbal one tvc actuator we're all about simplicity about lowering cost and you got to be serious about that yeah you don't just uh have nice to have things when your mantra is you know changing the paradigm right so yeah with single axis gimbal and four engines you effectively have one big engine you have those two axis control and it showed that you know it was one out that even with the single axis gimbal for a large part of the trajectory it was okay on the the rd-170 i think also is single axis on its four chambers and yeah you can basically do everything all those you know yeah you know i spent a lot of time a few years ago climbing around under soviet rockets and and looking at things and getting inspiration from that and really the four engine configuration and the single axis gimbal comes exactly from that yep this turbo pump you know we worked with our ukrainian partners i had a group of about 200 people working at ukraine at one point and they helped us design this turbo pump so this is a really unique machine this is the first time there's ever been a real combination of you know soviet uh heritage technology and american heritage technology like the stress chamber is space shuttle main engine heritage with this copper nickel plated chamber and there's a lot of know-how and heritage from soviet rocket engines inside this turbo pump so this is a totally unique experiment to to bring you know the east and west together in one engine design because now you're talking my language i don't i've been working for two years on an entire family tree of every soviet rocket engine and the his like you know how they're all connected is it yeah it all stems you know eventually gets back to the a4 but yeah um you know it's it's been really fun to just trace even the inner lineage of you know turbo pumps and this led to this and um so that kind of brings up a question for me with with your with a fixed throttle does that mean you can't actually throttle down at max q or anything is it or is it full bore once it's running it's just running or do you have a way of throttling beyond that yeah right now it's full bore once it's running it's it's running but um you know we can put that variable element in there we have it for we're planning to use on an upper stage engine uh so you don't want to be able to down at max q like most rockets tend to like that thrust bucket or whatever where they you know no we just have it designed to run at about six g's at shut down i mean there's some subtle things we can do we can actually adjust the tank pressure and that'll give us a little bit of of throttling if we lower the the propellant tank pressure but um when you prove to your fuselage can handle high g loads i mean holy cow yeah wow so what's your what's your combustion ratio inside the main combustion chamber or your fuel oxidizer ratio sorry yeah about 2.3 but the the magic and what we have the patent on happens inside the head end of the engine here we call the tap off manifold the way we extract that that gas um and and the whole environment that we extracted in and how it that is um coupled with the topology of the flow around the injector all plays into how we do this and i can tell you this is the only tap off engine ever where we don't have to cool the exhaust the gas coming out of the chamber usually you have to dump like hydrogen or some diluent fuel in to get that temperature down because it's 6 000 fahrenheit inside there yeah this turbine can only take 12 1300 fahrenheit oh my god so we got to make sure that that 6000 isn't going out here and we've designed it all so that we don't have to put a drop of fuel in it we just uh and so you're burning you know with that 2.3 off that's not stoichiometric but it's it's it's pretty obvious it's optimal for isp so all that combustion takes place in that environment where you get you know good complete combustion with very little soot very important right you look at turbine okay as compared to a gg you're like running that thing at 0.3 off and it's just puking out like a big like steam engine from the 1800s yeah black clogging up turbine nozzles and all that this is extracting it you know all that gas from the you know the combustion chamber where you're producing a lot a lot less of that sort of stuff we've never had um any degradation of the turbine system no turbine nozzle uh plugging no coking um these we've never blown up one of these engines never oh my gosh and out of thousands and thousands of seconds of development and everything they just run and hopefully today won't be the day right right there's some water around here so so you're so you don't even do a helium or nitrogen spin start or anything to yeah we do we do a nitrogen spin start from the ground although we've um recently did a a series of tests where we're trying to figure out how well we can go on that that spin start with before itself kind of yeah before it bootstrap itself so we've definitely been playing with the the level of spin start that's required but we do spin start them but it doesn't okay but on the ground side it doesn't necessarily matter right i mean you can force you can have a tank the size of a semi truck on the ground side yeah but in the air for lightning i assume it probably matters a lot more yeah exactly for lightning and uh yeah what we found that we is we can probably just tickle this thing with a little nitrogen at altitude and get it to run wow much lower uh very low spin start requirements yeah the dream would be to deadhead start it um but we haven't gotten that brave yet okay i mean that's still amazing i assumed it in my head has to get like almost all the way up to operating speeds and then you like you know open the vowels and let it run but i didn't realize you were bootstrapping it so much that's pretty amazing john our propulsion director is back there he's okay hey i've been trying to get him to just plug the throat and then we can like get it running and let it blow the throat and blow that throw plug out that would do it without spinster yeah or blow it up so so it is regeneratively cooled though too so then that's kind of uh yeah that's like i said that space shuttle maintenance uh engine heritage um high strength alloy copper with uh electroplated nickel uh nickel cobalt yeah okay what do you uh if it's okay what do you use for the injector is it kind of a typical shower head design or is it yeah we have two designs we have one that we patented called crossfire which is a really unique super simple injector that's in the lightning engine and then on this one we use a more conventional pintle injector okay oh pintle cool wow and now remind you could actually throttle with a pintle injector couldn't you if you if you wanted to if you put variable elements in there to throttle it you can it makes it a lot more complicated right to do that but if you get it to work then you can also do a face shut off on the injector too and get rid of the main valves oh right so you just so that injector throttle becomes the main valve too because i think that is not what the lunar descent engine used was a pintle injector to be able to handle deep throttling yeah absolutely yeah that's yeah dang wow so um yeah we'll we'll probably get into that uh with our lunar engines we'll probably look at for a lunar descent engine more with that variable throttling okay you really have that deep throttling need or you got to use a a bunch of um smaller thrusters to yeah and pulsing thrust differentials yeah to get you know to kind of average out to whatever thrust you need at the time wow but the more elegant way is to just deep throttle uh and so i think we'll get into that um for foreign that's and blue ghost is that going to be uh is that or is that going to be pressure i assume it's going to be pressure fed right yeah blue ghost is pressure for that okay yeah space engines make sense for that kind of mission to make them pressure fed and use hyper galaxy and the other reason you do pressure fad is because you usually get into those pulsing applications right and you're not going to be spoiling a turbo pump and shutting it off yeah at 100 milliseconds right hard on the hardware yeah a little yeah that's awesome man this is a so when you guys you guys have run all four engines at the same time on the same test stand before correct yeah this this stand has a lot of heritage this was actually set up for the aerospike so you can see that there are 12 pads rest in piece yeah this each one of these pads was a combustion chamber for the aerospike yeah 12 12 combustors so aerospikes are my other besides soviet engines aerospikes are my other uh they're the you know the devil's engine obviously you know tempting but that never seems to be to be worth it but you guys got pretty far in development though yeah i mean our my opinion is that they're optimal for a pressure fed rocket so if you remember the in firefly space systems we were developing a a carbon fiber pressure fed rocket and um we get technical i mean so you know why your your specific impulse is all about thrust coefficient and hum you know that comes down to how much nozzle you can put on the engine so you can only expand the gas so far before the pressure becomes so low that the atmosphere starts to come in and destroy the flow pattern yep yeah so separation at the nozzle yeah so you want to make it as long long as as long as you can um another way to get a longer nozzle is to increase the chamber pressure so that you can kind of forestall that that place where it crosses over to atmosphere further and further out yep so on a pressure fed rocket to get that chamber pressure you have to pay for it in the pressure of the tanks which means thicker tanks thicker thicker tanks so you're in the pressure fed rocket you're really trying to lower the pressure in the propellant tanks but that means you can have a really short nozzle yes for the reasons i just said because the chamber pressure is very low yep um the way around that is the aerospace right so the aerospike allows you to have increased thrust coefficient by giving you a sort of a virtual nozzle extension so that you can use short nozzles on your combustion chamber and then have that additional expansion and thrust generation on the spike get the long expansion ratio that you can use at sea level it's obviously the whole beauty of aerospace yeah but it really allows the pressure fed rocket to get the thrust coefficient it needs to be viable at the end of the day i don't think the pressure fed rocket for orbital launch is viable without an aerospike now when you get some ukrainian friends and you get turbo machinery and you can just go up on pressure yeah it's um it's less attractive it's not not as necessary it's easier to go with a more conventional type nozzle okay yeah was that was that what was the final death for you with it with the aspect what was the final thing that closed or you just go you know was it the fact that you kind of got your hands on some on turbo machinery and people that were willing to design turbo pumps yeah it was really just we would have kept on going and flowing aerospike with firefly space systems if we hadn't run out of money and shut down and all that so when we got the new investor uh max polyakov uh he's ukrainian he is his uh he has heritage of in the family of uh soviet rocket science and so a lot of connections so max was able to connect me in with technical people in ukraine that could help us with the turbo machinery which put us years ahead i mean that's just it's really hard thing to do so then if you immediately connect with people with that expertise it's just like a a quantum step right um so we're immediately able to to you know connect our uh combustion chamber design to your ukrainian turbo machinery design and then i decided to take that little bit of extra risk for the for the big reward and to go forward on the tap off cycle so that was completely just a firefly call so um to connect these two we decided to go with the most elegant solution which was tap off yeah unfortunately it worked i could tell you the first time we were up in that control room and we ran it and you shut the spin start off and the rocket keeps running it's pretty wild it's working this whole principle of operations working and uh that was really exciting day one of my most exciting days here i'd say it's just very gratifying to see the the science work the risk to you know pay off and like we guys we just did something no one in the world has ever done with you know lux rp propellants run a tap off cycle rocket engine that's designed for orbital space flight so yep make history out here and out in the field is pretty amazing yeah yeah absolutely so um so tell me is there actually any heritage do you guys need to work on something we i could we could stuff afterwards you guys are trying to get ready to actually fire this thing yeah we don't want to be here when that happens well yeah we'll give them room to do that um is there uh is there anything that uh as far as uh the turbo pump and ukrainian heritage is there any actual heritage from other uh you know soviet era engines at all that you know of as far as like actual is like that turbo pump similar to you know something like an rd 264 or something like that or yeah th this i mean that pump is 100 clean sheet designed okay but the ukrainian team they're very process oriented and they just have a lot of design rules and um and methods that they use and just basic construction methods that are different than what we do for example the oxygen pump and the fuel pump in this engine are separate um they're on they're coupled they have a shaft coupler the couple's the two but you can actually remove them individually because over there they like to test them individually do flow tests with them and then assemble them into to one device so that's something that's that i have a single shaft but it's a has a linkage that you can like break it apart and yeah it's like it's a shaft with like uh yeah collar that couples the two shafts together and uh when we look at it it's like wow man that's going to be really tight tolerance to make sure that power gets transferred right and yep it doesn't you know these are things that they learned over the years how to do um and we were you know benefited from that you guys aren't putting dents in the nozzle now [Laughter] now the pressure's on yeah we're all nervous these days that one's gonna fly let's fly too this thing's gonna work i haven't done that in a year [Laughter] the whole world will see it now no big deal we will cut that out there oh that's awesome though but uh so with the uh did and obviously the soviets have a lot of uh a lot of or the soviets had a lot of experience with uh having really high temperatures at their turbine too i assume that's a was a pretty big limiting factor obviously you know you had to figure out how to cool it enough to have the turbine survive but was there some heritage there that you're like hey this this turbine that they design can handle higher than you know what other companies are maybe operating at yeah i'm not so sure they have higher turbine temperatures than we do they generally do um full stage combustion engines so they have hot oxygen yes you know i'm not sure the absolute temperature isn't is is higher it's just the fact that it's it's it's very reactive hot gas as opposed to inert hot gas i mean the temperature is really um limited by the rotor dynamics and the materials and the materials are you know in canal and the rotor dynamics are just a disc rotating right so um i don't i don't think there's anything okay necessarily different this the turbine wheel and this engine looks very similar to the turbine wheels i've seen so it's more about american rock the metallurgy and the fact that it has to handle the oxygen-rich environment as opposed to the actual temperature yeah that's where i mean if you want to go to the next level of complexity when you start getting into oxygen-rich stage combustion i mean oxygen's liquid oxygen is super friendly i mean it's hard to get it to do anything bad i've even had not here but in other places i've had um multiple engines where the liquid oxygen caught aluminum pieces of the engine on fire and the the liquid oxygen just cools it and quenches it and puts it out it's like oh sorry about that you know there's didn't mean to cut your engine on fire i put it out it's no big deal when you get into hot oxygen gaseous oxygen yeah white flashlight engine's gone i mean this is like gone this is like consumes it you know like what the hell just happened you know it's a completely different problem which required um many years and extreme amounts of money to solve the problem of coating the materials in the environment to be able to deal with that with that ox rich environment now here in america in the last decade or so we've come up with metallurgy that doesn't require these these advanced coatings so we in principle can build uh oxford stage combustions here that are that are even more robust than than what was done uh over on the soviet side in the 50s already is when they started doing ox rich i mean the stage can watch this yeah just go for it you know get the maximum thermodynamic efficiency you can so it's always funny to me that they were focusing while they were focusing on stage combustion the united states and almost never touching hydrogen the united states is doing hydrogen and and then solid you know solid rockets and that's something that soviets almost never ever did was anything solid it was all like stage combustion and lots of hypergolics you know yeah yeah yeah major hypergolics yeah yeah yeah they had the ss18 satan missiles which really caused us big problems and was part of a lot of the negotiations that during the reggae reagan era yeah those those vehicles could sit underground for 20 years that's what they're designed to yeah put it in the ground 20 years don't touch it liquid fuel rocket system yeah that's crazy that thing under the tarp is really the world's largest brazing oven for rocket engines there are two of them in the world one is there and the other one is building the rd180s in in russia this was used by aerojet rocketdyne but we acquired it last year and um and are setting up our own facilities so we'll be able to advance our engine um fabrication tech and move away from nickel plated chambers to brazed uh steel wall chambers oh wow okay that's cool so this the reaver and lightning will already be evolving beyond what we see today oh definitely yeah let's go up here we can maybe get a bird's eye view so this is our machine shop and one thing we're doing at firefly that i don't know how unique it is but we're really segregating the company into self-sufficient business units in order to just um make sure everybody has the resources they need to do what they need to do you know we're taking out a lot of projects we're doing lunar landers alpha rockets beta rockets space utility vehicles so part of doing that is we have to have the discipline to make sure all these projects have the resources they need so this machine shop for example is not just going to be like hey come in and get your stuff machined this is being set up as a commercial aerospace machine shop and they're going to work like that and we'll even do external jobs for for other companies so up here is kind of like where all the office and programmers and such are going to be but if you go along here you can look down and see i'm working on rocket engine parts see obviously somebody was working on a combustion chamber wow a lot of copper i like copper it's probably uh one down on one of these machines we can look at there's one over by that bin you can see it was recently machined chamber over there yep that's awesome these dmg machines are really advanced five axis machines with multi-pallet tool chambers like you can see that machine that's closest to us on the right has three pallets so you put three pieces of material there and then give the machine a program and it knocks out three parts without uh you know lights out without humans yeah just out boom boom right here you can see some reaver tap off manifolds being machined oh yeah those are inconel parts wow now we're really getting into uh 3d printing those in the future but for the time being we're doing some just by working with incannel forgings which hogging out incannel forgings is uh that's kind of yeah it's tough in canal the harder you push on it the harder it pushes back it works harder than as you're machining it so it's the donkeys of uh of of metal exactly that's a good way of putting it yeah harder now but we're adding a lot of machines here we just hired a new machine shop manager that has experience in mass production of combustion chambers so we're going to be following his guidance to buy some really kick-ass new machine tools that allow us to machine these thrust chambers in you know matter of hours instead of days like it takes wow but over on the right we'll walk down on the floor but on the right you can see how the thrust chambers start they start as a forging just kind of a rough shape that copper thing on the floor yeah it's kind of a rough shape and then we'll go down and you'll see how that gets turned down so i think we start with about 1200 pounds of material um and then it's by the time it's done it's about 80 pounds i think so yeah that's one thing we want to you know we look really closely at additive and you know when you think about those mature how much material you're removing looking closely at additive but you know in these sizes and guaranteeing you they have you have the material properties you need in a printing process we just we just haven't found that combination yet and we haven't found it being uh economical um even though potentially in a an additive process you could use less material at the end of the day if the part costs more right it's like why yeah yeah yeah so really i think 3d printing for some smaller parts has has been proven really really bad for prototyping phases prototyping fantastic you got it exactly that's yeah if you want to make something fast and try a bunch of different permutations and iterations it's uh it's the way to go but for large scale things like thrust chambers yet i just haven't seen it wow you guys have a lot of space you're looking to be expanding like crazy aren't you yeah like i said i'm really serious about this machine shop becoming a commercial shop so i'm giving them all the space and offices and stuff they need she'll have um you know people doing pricing you'll have people ordering materials you have people managing tooling and then the programming of all the machines it's it takes you know quite a few people did you guys see a pretty big surge um after your first flight attempt of people new hires and and just a lot more excitement around the company there's definitely energizing to the company i mean my whole mantra the corporate culture i want is accomplishing great things and having fun along the way so every time you accomplish something bigger and bigger it just uh kind of motivates you more and empowers people more so i think we're definitely got you know a little more swagger and we're still that we're still humble because you know the rocket's always humbling you but uh uh yeah definitely people just we're hungry we're pissed off and we want to get back you know at least i am oh but it's i mean that again you validated so many things for a first launch attempt that it has to feel at least you know you're on the right your right direction and uh yeah you know you got it coming next yeah you know the rocket i've always as i said before the launch i have complete confidence the rocket's designed well and there's nothing in that first launch that tells us we have to change anything except move some connectors around things like that yep yep that's yeah that's great what is your timeline for the next launch we'll be ready in december um we've got regulatory stuff we've got to get through our investigation uh get final buy off from the faa we might do a slightly different trajectory so there's some updates but i was surprised i didn't realize until literally like the day before launch that you guys were flying so retrograde yeah what was that what was the purpose of that as opposed to a little more polar uh scary new rocket getting away from lancaster that's crazy i didn't realize that that makes sense i mean you're just trying to get to or but you're not trying to yeah we're trying to do as a test test flight yeah but yeah i mean when the thing's going next time it'll be over hawaii in like 15 minutes after lunch which is pretty pretty wild wow yeah that is no i don't think we have any no thrust chambers up today no not today there's that one that's over there that i did here's one of these turbine wheels if you want to look at yeah you can take a picture of that it's okay it's just pretty wow so that's rotating about 33 000 rpm inside the engine and that obviously has to be extremely precise and extremely well balanced extremely well balanced but what's amazing is that you know 900 horsepower you get out of that out of that turbine wheel to drive the pumps so just the pump at the bumper balance 900 horsepower it's pretty cool and i love that uh the the little buckets you know the little the little bucks that catch gas it's pretty crazy that yeah but they can handle those kind of forces and that kind of pressure and temperature and everything yeah i mean you're converting the kinetic energy of that gas into the kinetic energy of this guy yeah like you said it's a bucket it just catches it and turns it this guy goes faster the gas goes slower so that's awesome that's very cool this is brett he's uh one of our you were great man i really enjoyed yeah yeah well i really enjoyed your launch that was amazing we really uh i was i was just so excited about it honestly wait for the next one yeah you guys are gonna knock it out of the park in the next one i know it yeah i know it is there is there some kind of uh d-level nozzle that that uh that exchanges the pressure into higher velocity at the turbine like before the turbine exchanges the pressure and higher velocity yeah yeah definitely yeah so they're they're the tap off gas comes in uh to a little ball nozzle it's pretty interesting geometry i don't know if we have one around here but it's it's a scarf nozzle if you've seen um if you take a normal nozzle and you just cut part of it off yeah that's called a scarf nozzle so it's kind of like half of a nozzle really yeah it expands in there and um so there you you take uh the pressure from the tap off which is about 1100 psi expanded through a nozzle to about 30 psi what 100 psi is coming off that tap off yeah it's coming right out of the combustion chamber commission chamber runs up to 1300 psi really sorry what's that in bar that's almost all like 80 90. it's about 90 bar yeah yeah wow okay that's higher than i thought considering it's you know i always assumed that you had to have no we can do anything with the tap off that you can do with the gas generator and probably more efficiently yeah so we're moving up uh i mean 1300 psi for kind of first generation engines pretty pretty sporty pretty good it's a lot higher than uh engine programs i worked on for other companies yeah for first person i think you can get beyond that and oh yeah yeah i mean the technology that like i said that space shuttle main engine technology that could go to 3000 psi chamber pressure now um it's not smart to do that with an open cycle engine but um has to do with the turbine efficiency pressure ratio across the turbine that 1200 1300 is about optimal also with rocks rp propellants it some of the products that condense on the surface of the chamber are beneficial for uh for inhibiting heat transfer to the wall right so once you get up about above about 1200 psi that sort of carbon layer starts to come off so it kind of runs away your your um cooling problems get worse very kind of precipitously as you go over that mark it's not just 100 psi is a little bit different because your sit goes away and now you've got much more heat transfer to the wall so there are other factors that play into what's going on in there so the coking on the combustion chamber can almost aid as like a as an insulating bearing oh it absolutely does it's a big it it's really effective thermal barrier coating for free right so all that you saw on my face and then that chamber that's great for thermal barrier coating i didn't never see you transferring never thought about that but if you go to too high of or you go too high pressure that goes away and it's just pure copper like you know exposed yeah that's crazy wow which is a unique part of the lux rp engine and box rp is amazing for a boost propellant frankly i don't know why anyone would use anything other than the max rp for for boost propellant certainly for upper stages higher energy propellants are better but when you look at the impulse density as you call it or you know how much impulse you get per unit volume it's on par with with anything out there yeah you know methane better performance but bigger tanks and it all kind of washes out to be equal but then you got all the hassles of lower explosion limits and handling that stuff and cryo yeah so i i mean it's like it's pretty bizarre when you think about rockefeller and those guys were like making kerosene back in the 1890s and it's the absolute perfect thing to go to space after all these years that's crazy yeah that's awesome huh so and with um do you guys do any additional like film cooling at all like um on the injectors or anything to because that's another way of doing the combust cooling the combustion chamber too is uh an additional layer of fuel or something right that yeah we found that we can run the barrels you know without any film cooling at all which is another thing that cranks up efficiency on some engines we early on we put um film cooling in the throat area because that's where you get scariest that's the highest heat foxes there um but we've had engines we've run without film cooling eventually no foam cooling but the early ones you know we're more conservative have a film pulling in them also like that first flight of alpha the engines ran at 2.20 you know which is just some more conservative cooler running uh combustion temperatures but then we'll just incrementally march up you know we've run these engines at 2.4 or 2.5 off and haven't had anything crazy happen yet how do you cool it just the throat where do you have to inject a separate place to inject uh fuel or something to at a throat i never understood that yeah so um i wish we had a chamber here with the cooling channels in it so that chamber will have cooling channels milled into it yep and then it will put wax in those channels and then we'll electropipe nickel over that and then we'll melt the wax out now you've got channels that's how we make our coin channels okay now before you put the wax on when you have those channels if you just go a little bit above the throat and use an edm about you know 12 mil edm to electro discharge machining wire and just pop little holes through those cooling channels into the chamber before you plate it now you plate it and in those channels you have little tiny holes an array of little tiny holes above the converging section and that will inject jets of cold fuel so basically like intentionally will leak a little bit intentionally leaks exactly interesting yeah and i've been seeing these engines are amazing and i haven't seen this here as much but i've seen places where the engine will actually erode itself down to the point where it starts leaking and then it's happy and it doesn't go any further it just like self regulates yeah interesting yeah almost like an ablative nozzle unintentionally but self-correct it reaches an equilibrium and it doesn't blow up it doesn't go away it just kind of erodes back so that the wall is thin enough to get the heat transfer and sometimes it leaks too and and that's easy yeah wow that's awesome yeah the special guys did us good getting getting the stuff working yeah hundred percent yeah okay no you're good i've been touching my face again working man awesome yeah 145. that's right i don't maybe this wasn't supposed to be a propulsion interview but i like to get involved in that stuff well that's and that's i love all the little little little uh you know nitty gritty gritty details like this you know especially when i get to talk to someone that that knows what they're talking about i'm gonna pick your brain all day you know this is this is fun stuff for me and my audience in particular i think tends to really like you know getting into these things that they don't get to hear about all the time you know yeah and unique solutions i love that every different company every different engineer will have you know tackle the same problem with a different solution and it's just cool to see you guys using the tap off like that i think that's awesome yeah yeah so this is this whole place is kind of like living in a home that you're building around you while you're living in it for people that have done that so yeah a lot of these buildings are catch-all we're moving a lot of things to cedar park you'll get to see the spacecraft facility and we're going to move the final integration of the rockets down there soon as well and we're building a huge like world-class composites facility with robotic auto fiber placement machines if you see their dirt moving over there that's going to be a big facility twice as tall as these buildings twice as big and so we have this amazing aircraft technology auto fiber placement machines that were that we've procured and we're going to use to build rockets that's awesome because as you saw this stuff is hand built up by hand wow this is bigger than i thought to be honest just being up close and yeah this is just the lux tank this is just the liquid oxygen tank for first stage and again you have no liners or anything it's just straight on nope we don't know straight up yeah the technology of how we figured out how to put domes and stuff in here was really hard but it's one of our innovations yeah that's my understanding it's pretty darn hard to keep locks happy in a pure locks like that happy in a carbon fiber environment can be pretty pretty difficult yeah but it's like i said a deluxe is pretty well behaved from a reactivity perspective we have never had any problems with any of the stuff catching on fire so here's flight two going together i think that was flight three that we passed this is flight two getting ready to integrate engines that engine that's out there testing will be integrated on here you can see the whole first stage assembly fuel inner tank oxygen that's amazing so the team's trying to convince me to paint something fancy on the the bottom here we have the the phoenix on the first one to kind of represent you know just the resilience of the company you know having setbacks bouncing back coming back to life rising from the ash rising from the ashes all that and uh so i wanted to keep the second fight pretty simple they help you can see but now they're they're talking about putting some like highly decorative phoenix on it or something so we'll see what they come with so composites is working on like flight five i think all these tanks over here so they're you guys are cranking they're they're ahead they're they're serious about making that flight right nice next year so by by the end of next year we'll have one of the have flown five more rockets so we're we're confident in the design so we're building it and yeah yeah this is probably the 18.2 fairing and you guys did something a little different for your yeah you can see i'm making the clpvs over here sorry you're good for your first flight you went ahead and kind of certified and and did a lot more steps that would be unusual for a first flight if i recall you were certified and ready for flight by doing all the cataloging and everything you'd normally do for a customer is that correct i feel like there's maybe some extra steps you guys did even on your first flight that'd be yeah the scrutiny that you undergo at a range like the 30th is totally different for example in a nasa range where you're basically following uh industry standards and osha and things like that at the 30th and the 45th at the air force you know ranges you're following that whole regimen that ula and all the heritage companies have to follow and you know we we purposely did that you know we didn't want to just like go to alaska and just start blowing up stuff you know we want i really feel like the the rigor that went into getting everything right for the range translates into quality assurance really that's just going to make the product mature faster than just running out there with you know stuff duct taped together and trying to see what it does yeah that's interesting are we doing a q that's our new uh cubicle copb i may have to that might be an intern project i may have to have a conversation with them about pressure vessels i don't know what that is so i'm just trying to strengthen the shoe box so we're building up all of our area assembly areas we're getting new buildings and stuff there's just so much stuff crammed in here these guys are building valves they're building composites over here building engines over uh plumbing over here so they have um they have template engines so they're building all the fluid lines so these are just like uh like when you're making dresses like pattern you know right pattern pattern dummies yeah so they can come up here and i call them double yeah double check and weld stuff up that's awesome walk through here yeah we may um we may edit some of your video here on some of these tools or kind of proprietary so building the composites you need to do it in this clean and cool environment but it it's really arts and crafts at this point you have these tools fairing tool dome tools barrel tools and it's folks in here laying out patterns one at a time we have a laser projection system that we use for a lot of these operations where it'll project the pattern onto and and all they have to do is lay it up lay it up lay it up just follow the as follows and say go and it puts the next razor thing up this fairing is one that we don't have programmed in there but uh some of the other parts we do so it's almost like a paint your own paint by code but it's a very like carbon layup by by number yeah it'll actually put the number for a laser project like that no up there and with the exact shape and you just stick it right where the way you know that it'll have the outline up there you just stick it right there that's crazy wipe it down feel filled off and then just say go and it just moves around that's insane yeah but when we get the auto fiber placement machine it'll just go in here robotically and lay all this stuff up it can move like 15 miles per hour this head of um it's called a toe it's a uni uni-directional toe so this stuff is all fabric it's like woven fabric if you look at it you can't really see it there but it's like woven fabric uh the stuff that goes in the auto fiber placement machine is unidirectional so the benefit of that is it can align the fibers exactly in the direction of the force instead of with the fabric the 90 degree one goes along for the ride right because it's fabric so often you do them 45 to where the load is but with the uni you can just line it right with with the load and get an even more efficient structure than you can with the fabric so it's fast lower cost weight savings optimal supply chains established they build 777s with this technology just write a 10 million dollar check and you get one sweet where do i sign up that's awesome and then so for the fabric it's it just comes in rolls like this rolls out here and this table cuts those cnc cuts those patterns wow that is cool that'd be fun to be the person that's designed all the shapes and no especially with the fairing where it's a little more contoured you have a little more you know unique shapes and stuff it'd be it'd be fun to have to figure out you know how to do that as efficiently as possible well we have a partnership with with siemens and they make nx and team center and they have some other fiber carbon fiber dedicated tools that do exactly that and the cool thing is it helps you lay it all out when you're designing it and then it takes all that layout and takes it to the environment where you can do the stress calculations directly and then it can export these patterns for you and then it can program that laser like all for in one so you just do one model and from there on it just does all this other stuff automatically wow this automation that's we're just getting into that that's gonna be really cool uh upgrade next year that's awesome so there's some other tricky things that you have to do like um so our tool is not long enough to do the entire liquid oxygen tank so we have to actually splice multiple sections sections together and they're multi millions of pounds of force when this thing's pressurized that are trying to rip this billion i'm like millions of pounds okay so and there's liquid oxygen inside here so nothing can crack so getting this joint to work was a um was a technical challenge for us and and they uh figured it out but we've been we've ordered a tool that's long enough to do the whole thing now so eliminate that stuff eliminate that step but that's good that was a big technical achievement and then getting the you know how do you seal these tanks out we found a way to do it completely with carbon fiber so there's no metallic you'll see there's no metallic joints here whatsoever which is important in the cryogenic uh for cryogenics because one of your big problems is differential thermal expansion right everything gets cold the stainless steel or whatever it's like i'm cold and the carbon's like i don't feel anything you know and they and they end up separating expanded different rates basically and then so then you get cracks and leaks and all that stuff so we spent a lot of time figuring out how to do almost everything and just carbon without any of those metallic interfaces so yeah we're in the process of building that up we're going to get rid of these trailers these are my little beautification projects i'm building parks i'm gonna build another park here when i get rid of this trailer it looks like we need to build some parking lots eventually so in these trailers these tents i have some goodies did you see these uh rocket parts last time you were here i i saw the uh it was almost like a an h1 or something or some weird um variant of uh not the h2 but it was some other weird yeah so that's that engine there so the so this engine was the um tr i think we should go look at it if i remember it was like trws uh attempted the j2 maybe yeah you got it you know you know exactly what's going on here yeah i just want to make sure i think it was aerojet's attempt at the j2 and rocketdyne won with the j2 um yeah i think it's a zero jet on here somewhere such a unique engine even got some wasps living in here this is interesting there if you can get a picture of that wasp going in there yeah that's actually those wasps have caused many of a problem with rocket engines they're called mud daubers and what they do what they do is any little hole they just find a little hole and they go out catch some grasshoppers chop them up shove them in the hole get more grasshoppers shove them in there go in there lay some eggs for the babies and then they seal it with a mud seal and fly off and then the babies are born they have a good snack but many rocket engines and i had this problem when i was running the spacex's mcgregor site a lot and i kind of learned my lesson there we had many of these valves work on the principle of like pressurizing something and then venting it and if it doesn't vent then the va then like a main valve will stay open so we've had like these mud daubers unbeknownst to us will clog like a vent port and then you go and run the engine and go shut it off and it just keeps going and it's in an engine blows up or something and it's because of it how do you avoid that do you just purge the everything they have these wonderful little um screens that um you screw on the fittings and they just have a screen on them so that the mud can't climb in yeah gotcha yeah so anyway yeah i think this was aerojet's uh version of the j2 uh that just never quite made it so it's a locks hydrogen apollo uh experimental engine so we're gonna clean it up and give it a proper display at some point it's just in here temporarily and it looks like it's dual shafted yep that's cool wow yeah huh that's crazy so it's gonna be pretty rare i feel like there could have been too many of those things made no i think it's got to be pretty unique it's probably worth a lot of money deserves a better home than out here in a town hey i'll take it i'll put it on display yeah yeah i think the the neat thing about working working with elon and jeff as they were both really really understood the technology and i always thought it's an important part of these types of companies that at least when you're starting up that the the leadership can discern you know good ideas from bad ideas careful with the sharp edges yeah and to be able to lead from a position of knowing the technology as opposed to just kind of always just from the business end of things is probably very beneficial when it comes to a rocket company you know i think if you just look at the various companies that are out there it shows and the results you know peter beck is really into into the technology and you know they've made a lot of progress quickly yep are you uh now if i recall so alpha has no plans on ever being recoverable or anything right but that's what bait is for yeah yeah no immediate plans i wouldn't roll it out but really we're focused on beta and the reusable reusable parts because beta needs to be you know really cost competitive on a dollar per kilogram basis alpha less so because it's it's it gives you dedicated mission uh capability where people are willing to pay more for cost per kilogram but beta you know it'll be able to do gto missions and it needs to be needs to be low single digits thousand dollars per kg so awesome reusability is going to be important that's your test stand out there the two of them right that's that's stage test stand then a structural test stand over on the far left okay behind this telephone pole is the quick disconnect stand so that's where we practice that um we actually move simulate the rocket moving up and pull the qd off so that we get all the dynamics right and then the little walls you see behind those four tanks that's a component area where we can burst thing take things to burst and such cool next up is to build some beta size stuff yeah and there's some betas you guys are going to be so excited there's so much going on with beta crazy stuff so tell me i can't tell you anything you can't tell me anything not even not even uh i don't even know if it's gonna have the same engines or anything um i've just um the way the i think um so anyway this is where we built out of the the test stands and and such well welding welding i don't see anything major going on right now but uh the interesting things about beta are going to be first of all it's going to fly first just like alpha first so you know relativity and rocket lab catch me if you can um and you know one of the things we'll do it's not just about technology it's about business relationships so i think you'll see some interesting relationships we have with various energy entities to to bring the beta development along quick quicker it's awesome so here they're getting ready to run engine test so we have three control rooms here this one legion we use for the stage testing uh this one for engine testing and then there's one on the other side that's for structural testing it's a pretty lightweight operation you see it's basically uh really two people that can run the whole task there's one engine responsible engineer who's sitting there so you have you have a test engineer a test conductor and then a test director so the the test engineer is is um i'm sorry the test conductor is reading off of a procedure that's established that's been run 100 times and the test engineers executing the commands to prepare the stand and execute various auto sequences and is also just watching on monitoring the general health of the stand the test director is representative from the propulsion department and he or she is carefully monitoring the health of the rocket engine and making sure it's ready to go or calling it abort if there's an issue in some point and then if we do have aborts that the test director looks through the data adjusts the boards and things like that to get ready for the next one so that's basically how it works but you can see looks like they're got everything cleared out since we were out there yeah so this engine's uh this one must have run because it had sit on it didn't it yep so i thought this one was brand new but uh so that's conditioning the stand letting liquid oxygen uh go through all the lines leading up to the engine to to make sure everything's cool take it from the 100 degree texas sun to we we like to run the liquid oxygen about minus 295 degrees fahrenheit so it takes a little bit to get all that stuff cooled down so thermally yeah not shock it yeah i mean you don't want to put like minus 290 or minus 285 that's hot by like rocket engine standards and if it gets hot then it's like it cavitates so when those turbo pumps are trying to run at 30 000 rpm you start getting bubbles uh because the vapor pressure of the lick of the liquid oxygen is high because it's warm so that's really the main reason we try to have to get everything nice and nice and cold wow now spacex they take it a step further and they like try to cram more oxygen into the rocket so they supercool it so where as we go to minus 295 i think they're probably running like minus 320 or something like that yeah it's 207 minus 207 centigrade but i don't know what that is in fahrenheit yeah all right well you you're you've got your european uh yeah that's all this stuff yeah if you're a rocket scientist you'd say ranking but maybe i would understand i don't understand healthy kelvin and ranking absolute temperatures yep yep so how far are we away from uh you guys lighting that light in that fire i don't know let's go find out so this is our lunar landscape oh cool so this is where we practice really with the real vision navigation systems uh practicing our landing on the moon terrain recognition and all that got some weeds out there which we don't expect to encounter anymore but um do you do that with a drone then or something yeah we do with a big drone but it has the actual cameras and the actual software that the the lander has on it so we can practice uh testing that software and yeah which i'll tell you it's pretty wild when you're you're like out there standing in that and you're in the middle of cal field in texas like thinking we're like really figuring out how to land on the moon in the middle of the field that's awesome let me see so one of these guys ready hey guys when should we head out 2 30 okay so we have 14 minutes okay it's okay i was hoping to set up a high speed too from some kind of vantage point okay we got like 15 minutes so we better go okay yeah cool like it's like looking at welding kind of like just look over at the those poles instead of like straight at it because after that it will leave a little hysteresis in your eyes it's not gonna it's not gonna hurt you but right right just a little bright yeah a little bit cool advance also just the act of venting the tank actually cools the liquid oxygen too it causes it to in the tank it causes it to boil and as it boils it removes heat from the rest of the bulk liquid yeah thermal thermodynamics doing they're doing their thing right yeah it's called saturation so it's the same thing we do on the launch pad we just put the liquid oxygen in it doesn't really matter what temperature it is and then we just sit there and you'll notice the boiling rate goes down down down down down as itself cools okay yeah the other thing you can do is bubble uh helium little helium into the liquid oxygen let it percolate up through the oxygen and as it does that there's a there's a concentration gradient uh nature aborts a gradient of any time any type not just vacuums so you got pure helium oxygen and the oxygen tries to infiltrate that pure helium so it evaporates into that and in the process it um releases heat and cools the oxygen and the helium convects it up and boils it out the top so that's another way we cool it it's called you'll heal sometimes you'll hear helium bubbler on or something and really anybody that's launching rockets and that's what it is they you bubble healing from the bottom and off the top and cools it kind of a weird way to cool but yeah here we go you get four of those together it gets really interesting holy crap that was so much brighter than i thought and louder too that was a little dust coming back toward us holy crap look at that okay that was amazing [Music] [Music] cool to go to work and be scared by the things you're working on all right i got to go back to the to working on the right awesome hey thank you so much for your time it was really awesome thank you thank you so much the teams here at firefly aerospace for letting me walk around and just check out all this stuff i love it and i got to tell you that was the closest i've ever been to a rocket engine firing it's a lot brighter than i thought and it's pretty stinking loud that was amazing so thank you for that i owe a huge thank you to my patreon supporters for helping make videos like this and everything else we do here at everydayastronaut possible if you want to help support what i do and gain access to our awesome discord community or lots of other behind the scene things head on over to patreon.com everydayastronaut and while you're online be sure and check out our awesome web store like this the aerospike shirt which is fitting considering firefly was originally trying to do that aerospike engine or lots of other fun stuff like the rest of our schematics collection our future martian shirt full flow lots of fun stuff at everydayastronaut.com shop thanks everybody that's gonna do it for me i'm tim dodd the everyday astronaut bringing space down to earth for everyday people [Music] you

Channel: Everyday Astronaut

Views: 514,097

Keywords: Rocket Factory, How rockets are made, Rocket engines, Tom Markusic, Firefly Aerospace, rocket engines, how rockets work, rocket engine tour, Reaver engine, Firefly, Austin Texas, Austin Rockets, Rocket company, Tim Dodd, Everyday Astronaut, Rocket factory austin texas, Austin rockets, firefly rocket company, Alpha rocket

Id: ac-V8mO0lWo

Length: 65min 4sec (3904 seconds)

Published: Mon Oct 11 2021