/ An earlier image from Firefly showing a nighttime stage test at its Briggs Test Stand in Central Texas.
with a local television station , Firefly Chief Executive Tom Markusic said the incident “resulted from fuel coming out of one of the engines that created a small fire . When a rocket starts up, it sounds like an explosion. It’s very powerful, there’s fire that comes out of the rocket engine, so there’s noise. It was not an explosion. ” Comeback kid
Markusic also accepted blame for the incident spurring confusion and fear among local residents. “It was just very normal rocket testing stuff,” Markusic said. “The response was larger than it needed to be. And I will take the blame for that. We didn’t properly communicate that there wasn’t an issue to the local emergency response folks. ”
If the rocket and test stand are indeed intact, the turnaround could be fairly quick. Certainly, other rocket companies have experienced far worse anomalies during the build up to their first flights. The Firefly test site lies only about 60 miles away from SpaceX’s much larger McGregor engine test site. Back in January , as the company performed a pressurization test on its Falcon 1 rocket, the first stage fuel tank blew apart due to poor welds. But just two months later the company’s propulsion had a new tank on the stand and completed a static fire test of the entire rocket in May. (Read More )
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