Early Saturday morning, another company entered the exclusive club of successful orbital launchers, Firefly Aerospace. Their second attempt to reach orbit, named To The Black, lifted off at 07:01 UTC on October 1. The rocket’s four Reaver engines ignited, and the vehicle headed south into an unusual highly retrograde polar orbit. Just under eight minutes later, it was in orbit.

This made it only the second carbon composite structure rocket to reach orbit after the Rocket Lab Electron, and the first rocket to do so with a combustion tap-off cycle engine. This cycle takes some hot gas from the combustion chamber and redirects it back into the turbopumps to power them, instead of using a separate gas generator. The combustion tap-off cycle is simpler to make and in operation, but harder to start up and rougher on the engine because of higher temperatures. Blue Origin has previously flown a tap-off engine, the BE-3, on its suborbital New Shepard engine.

An hour later after another burn of the second stage engine, the payloads deployed. This engine restart was considered a stretch goal for the demo mission.

It took some time to confirm these two events as the second stage missed its first ground station pass over Hawaii, finally phoning home over South Africa and again in California. Teams later identified that the issue in Hawaii was with the ground station itself, not the rocket. This isn’t unexpected for an inaugural launch as teams work out issues between the rocket and all of its global infrastructure.

Wait a moment. Firefly? Reaver? To the Black? This company is full of sci-fi nerds. Gotta love it.

Because this was a test flight, the vehicle only carried three payloads totaling 35 kilograms of the 1,000-kilogram payload the rocket is designed for. It’s common to put real but low-value slash-risk payloads on launches of new rockets. Either that or large blocks of metal. Remember the Tesla SpaceX launched on the first Falcon Heavy? That was also a demonstration payload. Rocket companies may offer a very reduced or even free ride to orbit, with the understanding that the payloads may not make it to orbit.

One of the successfully launched payloads was Teachers in Space’s Serenity II. The first Serenity was on the first Alpha, which failed to reach orbit. Another payload, a PocketQube deployer, also flew on the first Alpha flight with a second one built for flight two. PocketQube’s are like CubeSats but even smaller – only five centimeters on a side. Six PocketQubes were deployed on today’s flight.

To The Black was originally scheduled to launch earlier in September but was delayed after two aborted attempts and a further delay after a typhoon traveled up the west coast of the US.

Alpha’s next mission will be for NASA, launching the ELaNa 43 mission.

More Information

Firefly press release