Pretty much every endeavor to leave lower Earth experiences an unexpected fire or explosion at some point in the testing process. And Cedar Park-based rocket and satellite delivery startup Firefly Aerospace has joined the ranks.
The company said it was testing its "Alpha" launch vehicle Wednesday around 6:30 p.m. when a fire broke out in the engine bay at the base of the rocket. They aborted the test and the fire extinguishing system kicked in -- no one was hurt. They're still not exactly sure what went wrong.
"Firefly engineers are reviewing test data from the stage to identify potential causes for the test failure, and Firefly will share results of that investigation once it is complete," the company said this afternoon.
There's a short video that, from a long distance, appears to show a flash followed by flames that lit up the sky in the immediate area.
Firefly also posted a video from much closer that shows what looks like a normal startup that gets out of control. It didn't respond to questions about damage estimates and whether the incident could impact its launch schedules. But it released a photo of the rocket after the test, which shows scorch marks, which one might expect at the base of a rocket, but no extensive structural damage.
While no one got hurt, rockets and their fuel are no joke -- the Firefly team evacuated and authorities evacuated people within a mile of the site, which is north of Cedar Park in Briggs. That meant that US-183 was shut down for a while, KXAN reported. Now, authorities are talking about revisiting their safety plans for the immediate area.
Firefly CEO Tom Markusic said the fire was "not a big deal," at least in the realm of rocket testing, and that emergency response to the fire was larger than it needed to be.
"I will take the blame for that in that we didn't properly communicate that there wasn't an issue to local emergency response folks," he said in a video a KVUE reporter posted to Twitter.
The fire came just a day after Firefly announced a new launch contract with Innovative Space Logistics BV to offer its customers space on its future launches starting this year. That was the latest in a series of launch agreements the company has secured in recent months.
Firefly's Alpha rocket has been expected to launch in April, and it was recently working on fully qualifying the rocket's first stage for a test fire. The company had expected that the test would confirm it's ready for shipment to the launch site, Space.com reported. Its first commercial payloads are with Benchmark Space Systems and AstroGrams, in addition to unnamed customers and an educational client.
The company reportedly had been building three rockets simultaneously.
