Main Engine Cut Off - T+226: Northrop Grumman and Firefly Partner on Antares

Starting point is 00:00:00 Hello and welcome to Main Engine Cutoff, I am Anthony Colangelo, and today we've got a fun story to break down. Northrop Grumman and Firefly are partnering on an upgraded version of Antares and a future new launch vehicle that is Firefly Beta, formerly known as, apparently. But we'll talk about that at the end of the show. This is big news for both sides of the deal. And I think, you know, this has been bouncing around my head for a couple of days now, weeks, I guess. It's been, I think it was only about 10 days ago that they announced this partnership. I spent some time thinking about it because from the Northrop side, it's a little bit more mysterious than the Firefly side about what exactly they get out of this, why they might be

Starting point is 00:00:53 interested in this kind of partnership. But let's break it all down. So to start with, why did this come about at all, right? Because this is something that would not have come about if Russia had not invaded Ukraine. I'm very confident to say that this exact deal as structured would not have come about. I think there might have been a deal like this kicking around because of Northrop Grumman's motivation long term. But this specific deal, upgrading Antares in partnership with Firefly, would not have come about from Northrop Grumman. Northrop Grumman flies Antares as part of their program to resupply the International Space Station. Originally, they were hoping to capture some either commercial or NASA science mission launch contracts. That has not panned out. You can go back into the archives. If you've been a longtime listener, you know my loving disdain for Antares, let's say. It is a really ill-fit vehicle for the market. It is

Starting point is 00:01:52 very limited in what it can do, both in payload mass, payload volume, but also orbits because of the launch site. It flies only out of Virginia, which really limits the launch sites or the launch trajectories that you can get to in terms of the commercial market, especially with a vehicle such as Antares, limited in the way that it is with payload. So there isn't a fit for it on the commercial national security NASA science market. So it really became a one-hit wonder launching Cygnus to the space station. Now, it is a vehicle with a first stage built in Ukraine, with engines built in Russia, so that's not happening anymore. They only have two more complete first stages,

Starting point is 00:02:38 but the supply beyond that is non-existent for a host of reasons. So, they needed to figure out what to do. And I think in another world where Northrop Grumman wasn't as interested long-term in the launch sector as they appear to be, they might've just let it wither, fly the last couple of sicknesses on a Falcon 9, on a Vulcan, whatever's available, do your commitment to NASA and the program that you've signed up on and try to get the best deal possible on those other launch providers and sail off under the sunset. But instead, they're taking this this tact, which is to partner with Firefly to create a new first

Starting point is 00:03:16 stage for Antares. It would fly with seven of Firefly's Miranda engines. I'm going to read a little bit from the press release here, just so you get the context directly from Northrop Grumman. Firefly's propulsion technology utilizes the same propellants as the current Antares rocket, which minimizes launch site upgrades. The Antares 330 will utilize seven of Firefly's Miranda engines and leverage its composites technology for the first stage structures and tanks, while Northrop Grumman provides its proven avionics and software, upper stage structures, and caster 30XL motor, as well as proven vehicle integration and launch pad operations. This new stage will also significantly increase Antares' mass-to-orbit capability. So it is an entirely new first stage, and if you take them at their word, it is the first stage

Starting point is 00:04:00 that will fly on Firefly's Beta vehicle. Now, they were calling it beta for a long time. This press release refers to the collaboration leading to a, quote, entirely new medium-class launch vehicle. We all read that as beta at the time. I guess there was some confusion as to whether or not that was beta. I will say that if you poke around the Firefly website,

Starting point is 00:04:22 that is basically confirmed because if you go under their launch tab and their navigation, there's Alpha, which is their launch vehicle that they'll be flying again in about a month. That is about one ton to orbit. And then there's an entry for MLV, which is the medium launch vehicle that they say next generation launch vehicle. When you click on that, it goes to Firefly.com slash beta, just like it did before. So they have updated the website a little bit to, I guess, obscure the name beta for whatever reason. But if you go to that website,

Starting point is 00:04:50 uh, you will see the first stage there has seven Randa engines. It is a Firefly structure. It is pretty confident to say, if you look at the, uh, the renderings of each of these, even so much as, uh, the, uh, you can look at the actual shape of the vehicle on the antares mock-up uh the cable raceway and and the piping is on the left side on the fireflies it's on the right side but it's identical uh even the little winglets at the bottom identical the engine structure identical so they straight up are going to use a firefly beta first stage on antares and partner on the creation of that north of grumman sounds like up are going to use a Firefly beta first stage on Antares and partner on the creation of that.

Starting point is 00:05:26 Northrop Grumman sounds like they're going to contribute some avionics software and whatnot. Firefly is obviously putting all of their engineering behind that. And it's going to fly as the first stage of Antares. Now, this is an out and out win for Firefly. They get a partner with a lot of heritage and ties to the national security market to work with them on their next generation launch vehicle. They have somebody to help share the funding of that. We don't know the exact structure of this partnership, but clearly, you know, I would assume there's some funds changing hands here because of the type of

Starting point is 00:06:00 work it is and the balance of what what each side is providing so you get someone to share the funding of your new launch vehicle creation with uh it's a straight up win you you basically fast track some of that work because it needs to fly now um they like i said they have two antares left on the north grumman side and they need something else to replace that they are hoping that this upgraded version of Antares that they're calling the 330 will be ready by the end of 2024. They only have enough Antares to cover through the second half of 2023, so they have booked three Falcon 9 missions to cover that gap to continue flying Cygnus to the space station in the gap between Antares 230 plus that they fly now

Starting point is 00:06:45 and 330 with the Firefly first stage. So you have a little bit more schedule pressure on that first stage existing than you would have if you're Firefly and you're just getting Firefly Alpha off the ground. Maybe you weren't ready to commit a lot of team resources to Beta yet, but now you have external impetus to do that. You have some funding that helps build out the team around it. Maybe you don't have to hire people to do the avionics and software for it because you can get that from the Northrop Grumman side. This gets things moving quicker in that direction. So it is a complete win for Firefly. On the Northrop Grumman side what is their motivation here? Antares, like I said, it's not a very useful vehicle

Starting point is 00:07:30 other than these Cygnus flights to the ISS it's never found its rhythm in the commercial national security market, NASA science markets it doesn't have a launch site that can fly anywhere but what Wallops can do, so it doesn't have I think you can do a dogleg to get to sun synchronous orbit from wallops much as you can from Cape Canaveral, but Antares does not have the payload margin to make that even useful. Uh, so they don't have a polar corridor. Um, you know,

Starting point is 00:07:56 they're not working on getting launch sites at Cape Canaveral, Vandenberg space for space, anything like that. So, you know, and the upgraded Antares is going to do what the Antares now does just can carry a little bit more mass up so there has to be some other motivation here for Northup Grumman or else there's really no reason for them to care about Antares as much as it is to put you know again we don't know the details of how much money they're putting on the line here but it's certainly something so what is it that they care about? And really, I think it boils down to relevance in the launch industry. And I want to dive into that deeper because there's a lot of different, you know, there's a lot of stuff tangled up in that, where the

Starting point is 00:08:37 launch market is, what Northrop Grumman's experience with it has been, projects that haven't panned out, and on the Firefly, why they care about the national security side is quite interesting as well to dig into. So before we do that, I want to say thank you to everyone who supports Main Engine Cutoff out there that supports at mainenginecutoff.com slash support. There are 858 of you every single month supporting the show. I'm so thankful for all of the help that you provide. And that includes 42 executive producers who made this episode possible. Thanks to Simon, Lauren, Chris, Pat, Matt, George, Ryan, Donald, Lee, Chris, Warren, Bob, Russell, Moritz, Joel, Jan, David, Eunice, Rob, Tim Dodd, The Everyday Astronaut, Frank, Julian and Lars from Agile Space, Matt, The Astrogators at SEE, Chris, Aegis Trade Law,

Starting point is 00:09:19 Fred, Haymonth, Dawn Aerospace, Andrew, Harrison, Benjamin, SmallSpark Space Systems, and seven anonymous executive producers. Thank you all for making this episode possible. That's a real credit. Put it anywhere, put it on your LinkedIn, and I'll back you up that you were the executive producer for this show, because this is an entirely listener-funded,

Starting point is 00:09:35 listener-supported show. Without you, I could not do all the things that I do, including trips to launches, such as Artemis I. So if you're gonna be in the Florida area for Artemis one, if you just live in the area and you want to come hang out and meet up off nom.com slash events, head over there. There's a page for the Artemis one launch events. Uh, Jake and I will be in town for the launch of many of the other Artemis or Artemis other phenomenal community members will be in town. We're going to do something. It's a very variable launch environment. So head over to that page, sign up on the newsletter

Starting point is 00:10:10 there. It'll go to Jake's newsletter. He will keep you up to date on exactly what's going on, what events are happening in and around the time of Artemis 1. So offnom.com slash events, sign up there so we can meet up in real life and I can thank you in person. All right. So why does Northrop Grumman care about this segment of the market? Well, if you look at specifically the national security launch market and the smaller end of it, right, not the big premier payloads that fly today on Falcon 9, on Atlas 5, soon to be Vulcan Centaur, not those big class, but the smaller class of satellites that have gone up over the past, you know, many years. Look at the recent decade or two, there was a lot flying on North

Starting point is 00:10:53 rop Grumman vehicles. Company name has changed several times, but the Minotaur, the Taurus lines, this was their section of the market. This small launch market was theirs, right? Now it was a lot. Pegasus, I should mention, should mention Pegasus, of course. It was a lot of money for those launches. It was tens of millions of dollars. And the past several years, as we watched the small launch market start to get more real, they were the first ones to lose out on that because the market for that small launch vehicle, responsive launch in some cases, went from, you know, a default to a Northrop Grumman solid launch vehicle to for like 10s of millions of dollars, right, 30, 40, 50, $60 million to these new small launch

Starting point is 00:11:37 providers that were charging, you know, 10, 12, $15 million. In some cases, the Falcon 9 rideshares have covered those missions for probably even less than that. So their relevance in the launch industry is completely dried up. Factor in the fact that they tried to get into that big national security space launch program with their Omega vehicle. That did not pan out. They scrapped plans to build out the Omega launch vehicle. It's not something they're working on anymore. So there are no active commercial launch projects that they're involved in. And if you're somebody like Northrop Grumman, who is a big time defense contractor who likes to take part in as many programs as you can, that's not super inspiring that you don't

Starting point is 00:12:22 have a hand in the launch market today. that's not super inspiring that you don't have a hand in the launch market today. So if they find themselves in this need to fly, you know, Antares flights, and if they think that Firefly has something going on that they're curious about being specifically one of those providers that was offering, you know, similar payload ranges for, you know, fifth of the price that Northrop Grumman was flying previously, maybe you're going to start cozying up to some of these small launch providers and see what they got going on and start considering whether it's just an investment and acquisition outrights, partnerships, you know, you want to sniff around these new competitors if you're a company like Northrop Grumman. Certainly, we've seen Lockheed Martin strategic investments be

Starting point is 00:13:03 involved with Rocket Lab, ABL, probably some others that I'm forgetting, but they've certainly had a hand in the small launch market and getting involved with these different players. So I think that's Northrop Grumman's intention here. Firefly's in a weird spot, right? They just had this big shakeup where Max Polyakov got the boot. this new ae industrial partner stepped in to acquire the stake from new sphere ventures his company um they had you know there was a major concern from the military industrial complex and the government around max polyakov's involvement especially around the invasion of ukraine uh with a bunch of the company based there. So there was, you know,

Starting point is 00:13:46 and I think there's debates as to the legitimacy of some of those concerns. But it's something that the, you know, military side of the contracting industry was not not pumped on and the government leadership side of things were not pumped on. Firefly lost access to their Vandenberg facilities for a bit there. I don't think, what was it? They lost their launch license. I forget the exact drama, but it's been pretty hectic there. And it led to this big changeover of ownership. And then the new owners come in and Tom Markuzik steps down as a CEO in something that didn't really sound like, you know, what his intentions were, was to step down right as they're about to launch their first vehicle. So big shakeups, you have a defense industry leadership group that's

Starting point is 00:14:31 not thrilled with the makeup of your company, but your product is valuable to that sector of the industry. So Northrop Grumman comes in with a partnership, they want to be relevant in the national security space sector. You've got a product, but not the ownership and leadership and caretaking that the defense industry is comfortable with. Well, now you got Northrop Grumman on your side. You know, hard to name a lot of companies that are more trusted by the military industrial complex than Northrop Grumman. You'd run out of fingers, you know, trying to run out of fingers in one hand first, if you tried to list some other companies that they are more precious about. So that adds the legitimacy and comfort, I guess, to Firefly for the higher levels of the defense industry there. So I think that's nothing to sneeze at. And I think just straight up from,

Starting point is 00:15:24 you know, from looking at the commercial side of things, Northrop Grumman was out of the launch sector. And now they've got a partnership with an up and coming company that I personally find pretty attractive from the business side in terms of this sector of the launch industry. And they had a pretty good first launch. They've got another one coming up in about a month. Seems like a pretty good bet to make in this sector of the industry. So I find there being, you know, initially I was like, I don't really understand why Northrop Grumman's getting at this.

Starting point is 00:15:52 And as I thought about it more, I realized that they want to have a hand in the launch industry, and this is really the only way that they have remaining to get involved. We'll see where it goes from here. I don't know if the new owners are looking for other investment or other partial ownership. I certainly would not be surprised to be a couple of years down the line and have this partnership go well and then Northrop Grumman come in and buy half or more of the company. I would not be shocked at that at all. I wonder if this partnership is to kick the tires a little bit harder and see are they really worth whatever it would be to buy whatever percentage they'd want to buy? This is certainly a great way to work, you know, arm and arm with them on a new launch vehicle to get something out of it for yourself to contribute

Starting point is 00:16:33 a little back. And if it pans out, then you can, you know, increase the relationship from there. Would not be surprised at all to see this. On the Firefly side, I do find it quite interesting that it was three years ago or so, I think it was October 2019, it was right around IAC in Washington, D.C., that Firefly announced this partnership with Aerojet Rocketdyne. It was a little bit murky in exactly what the partnership was they were announcing, but they did specifically call out that the AR-1 engine that Aerojet Rocketdyne had been working on would be a good fit for a redesigned Firefly Beta. They were going to use, I think it was like maybe two of those engines to, maybe two pairs, I forget the exact makeup,

Starting point is 00:17:18 but two pairs of the engines to create a new rocket. And I don't't know at the time i was like oh this does not seem like a good idea uh not seem like a good pairing with this very old slow-moving company with this new fast paced company didn't seem to make sense i heard at the time that the aerojet partnership was more about tapping into some of the aerojet expertise for issues that firefly was having internally on their own engines that they were working on for firefly Alpha. And that I guess as part of that, they threw a bone to Aerojet to say, we're considering AR-1 on beta. Even at the time, they said the engine selection was not a done deal. They were still thinking about beta. So clearly that was the case. But it's very interesting to consider. Aerojet Rocketdyne has this AR-1 engine that they developed and has nowhere to go. It's not going to be used on Vulcan. It's now not going to be used in Antares, which was

Starting point is 00:18:09 another place that you could kind of squint at and say, yeah, maybe that would work. It's not an exact fit in the way that it would have been for, you know, an Atlas V descendant, but, you know, I think you could, you could probably make it work, push cams to shove. And then they found, oh, well, you know what, maybe it's good for this medium lift launch market. And Firefly seems like a good fit for that. They don't have, you know, an engine that's far along for their upper, for their higher level launch vehicle. So, you know, maybe we'll sign a partnership with them. And then here we are a couple of years later, and you've got that company stepping in to work on Antares. It's quite the change of pace for Airjet Rocketdyne. But I guess that

Starting point is 00:18:47 leaves AR-1 exactly where we always thought it would be, which was without a customer, without a purpose, and not a lot of hope in its future there. So anyway, that was a long and rambling dissection of this deal. But I really do think this is quite interesting. I think it's a really smart move from both sides. Firefly gets some of the backing of Northrop Grumman and maybe starts winning over some more hearts and minds internally in the defense sector, adds a little legitimacy to them for some of the higher ups there that weren't thrilled with their previous makeup. Northrop Grumman gets some relevancy in the launch market again. And, you know, as much as I don't like Antares,

Starting point is 00:19:25 anything that launched out of Virginia is a quick drive for me. So I'm pumped about that to go see this thing take off in just a couple of years. So anyway, that is all I've got for you now. If you enjoyed this, head over to mainenginecutoff.com slash support, join the crew of supporters there. You can get Miko Headlines, which is another podcast I do every single week where I run through all the stories of the week. It's $3 a month or more. And it goes right in the podcast player where you're listening to this. It's a great way to stay up on the space news and support the show. So I'd appreciate if you head over there, chip in there if you like what you're listening to. And if you've got any questions or thoughts, hit me up on Twitter at wehavemiko

Starting point is 00:19:59 or on email anthonyatmainenginecutoff.com. And until next time, I'll talk to you soon.

Main Engine Cut Off - T+226: Northrop Grumman and Firefly Partner on Antares

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