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How Firefly Aerospace designs rockets for space travel | NX CAD for Aerospace

Welcome to another recap of the Next Generation Design podcast for the episode: Voyaging to the Moon: Rocket Design with Firefly Aerospace. You can watch the full video version of the episode below.

On this episode of the Next Generation Design podcast, host Greg Arnot interviews Morgan Feanny and Drew Summers, two engineers from Firefly Aerospace, to explore the exciting world of rocket design and space transportation.

Morgan and Drew from Firefly Aerospace take us behind the scenes of their design process—from whiteboard sketches to fully engineered rockets. Learn how they leverage advanced tools like Siemens’ NX and Teamcenter to iterate quickly and bring complex structures to life. 

They also reveal their thoughts on the role of AI in aerospace engineering, the significance of sustainability in rocket development, and the push for reusable rockets to lower costs and minimize environmental impact. The engineers also share insights on the future of space travel, the challenges of scaling rocket designs, and how the private space sector is driving a new era of exploration.

What you’ll learn about in this episode:

What is Firefly Aerospace?

Firefly Aerospace is a Texas-based private aerospace company founded in 2017 focusing on providing end-to-end space transportation services. Firefly is on a mission to enable our world to launch, land and operate in space, anywhere, anytime. They specialize in launch vehicles and spacecraft.

The design process at Firefly Aerospace

Drew, Morgan and Greg begin discussing the design process at Firefly Aerospace and how they get from concept to launch. They start with a goal or problem statement at a whiteboard discussion and then begin making early sketches. With the necessary stakeholders, they determine boundary conditions, constraints, what materials are available and what the budget is. From then, they begin creating a preliminary CAD model. They emphasize their iterative design process, so they iterate on and refine the CAD model through discussions, meetings and design reviews.

Morgan notes that sometimes the iterative process is physical and sometimes it is digital on the CAD models, running simulations and analyses virtually. But eventually, the iterations will come into the physical world for real-life validation of the design. The design touches different teams and design trades throughout the process to ensure it is up to regulations, standards and requirements.

CAD software and Siemens’ NX in aerospace design

Greg then Morgan and Drew about the benefits they see using CAD, specifically NX CAD software from Siemens Digital Industries Software. Morgan discusses how it’s nice to be able to “fly around in 3D space” and actually look at a design on the screen. You can make updates quickly, share easily with Teamcenter to get a visual representation and fully see the entirety and fullness of a design in CAD software.

Drew mentions structures as an area where visualization is especially helpful to note clearances with other components and knowing something will work when it’s manufactured. Morgan also adds that you can “virtually cut something in half to look at a joint.”

Rockets require very complex assemblies, but with NX, that design complexity is simplified. They mention how load settings such as how loading only one part of an assembly can speed up the design or review process, as well as how NX helps with being able to create structures with a “sandwich laminate,” as their previous software didn’t allow individual parts to have dissimilar materials. “With NX, it’s fully streamlined. It’s easier to do those kind of parts,” Drew says.

Before moving on, Drew also notes how helpful and useful advanced features in NX such as Synchronous Modeling are. “To be able to just do that on the fly without fully rebuilding the model, it’s so useful,” he says.

Challenges in the design process at Firefly Aerospace

We then move on to talk about challenges in the day-to-day design process working in the aerospace industry at Firefly. Morgan first mentions how regulations and the general rapid pacing of the industry can be a challenge, “It’s incredibly competitive. It’s like running on a treadmill. You have to always be innovating, always be iterating, testing, and doing better so that you are still a competitor in the industry,” she says. 

Drew then mentions that the iterative process itself is a challenge, especially if it is something they haven’t done before so they can’t apply lessons from previous experiences. There is a lot of trial and error in the design process. Morgan and Drew discuss a specific example with scaling their flight-proven 6-feet-diameter Alpha rocket to a medium-class launch vehicle that is 14 feet in diameter. Throughout the process, they are learning new lessons as they create a bigger rocket.

They mention that one thing that does help them face challenges easier though is collaboration with Teamcenter. Everyone at Firefly has access to view CAD files and drawings so can reference anything needed during a design review concurrently, whether they’re in the Cedar Park office or at the different test sites.

The future of sustainability in aerospace design and engineering

We then move on to talk about trends in the industry, beginning with sustainability. Morgan notes how important sustainability and especially reusability is in their field, as not only does it help from an environmental standpoint but it enables cost savings as they don’t need to start from the ground up every time. They save on labor costs as well as reduce lead times for materials the pain points that come along with creating something completely new. Both Morgan and Drew also add that Firefly is focused on composites and lightweighting with carbon fiber structures.

“Pioneering carbon fiber structures. That’s been Firefly’s main selling point—a fully composite rocket. So, lighter materials, better-performing rockets,” Drew says. Morgan adds, “When you have lighter structures, you can lift either more propellant or more payload.”

Morgan also discusses how designing for reusability evolves over time as a young aerospace company. When they first start out, they’re focusing on being flight-proven and less on reusability. When they are more established, they can pivot towards reusability if it’s economically viable. The three then talk about what recovery and reusability actually looks like in practice, including calculating where the rocket will splash back down.

The future role of the Industrial Metaverse and Immersive Engineering in rocket design

Continuing the talk on trends, Greg briefly explains the Industrial Metaverse and Immersive Engineering and asks if Firefly would benefit from leveraging immersive tools. Drew thinks immersive technology would be especially beneficial for integration and production planning. Morgan agrees with the benefits within manufacturing and production planning, and also thinks the integration of AR and VR into training could be incredibly valuable. Though they haven’t explored it yet, Morgan says, “We haven’t dipped our toes into that realm yet. I think it’s a technology that is very promising and has a lot of room to grow in this industry, and Firefly could absolutely make use of it in the future.”

Morgan adds how helpful immersive technology could be in manufacturing with mitigating issues that arise in non-conformance reports. For example, showing a circle where a bolt hole is meant to be if someone is a few degrees off during manufacturing.

Greg also asks if they would find value specifically in the Sony XR head-mounted display and NX Immersive Designer, with visualizing massive structures like rockets in an immersive environment. Drew says that an immersive experience would be really helpful with seeing models in real-time scale and space, visualizing sizes of parts and getting a sense of scale. With some parts being absolutely massive, they want to know if a crane would be needed, if multiple people would be needed to move it or if there is clearance to get inside the space to install a part before getting to the manufacturing stage. Morgan tells a story about discovering a part in real-life being much bigger than it’s on-screen digital counterpart, “Sometimes you do lose that sense of scale when you’re sitting behind a desk,” she says. “If I had the ability to slap on some glasses or a headset and be able to walk around the rocket at scale, that would be incredibly useful.”

The Sony XR head-mounted display and NX Immersive Designer software are now available for purchase. Discover the future of engineering by contacting sales.

How does Firefly Aerospace use AI in the design process?

Moving onto the last trend of the episode, we discuss AI and how/if Firefly is using it throughout their design process. Drew says that while they have experimented with generative design, improvements are necessary for it to be incredibly useful for their design process. He cites an example of generative design technology creating a “cool and optimized” part, but it could not take into account manufacturability, integration into the full assembly, or cost/budget into its design. However, he believes that as AI grows and gets more capable, it will be a very useful tool for engineering. “Maybe just to do a quick trade study for a particular design, where you can give it a prompt, and it can create a quick concept design that you can refine from there. Less so just a one-and-done and makes-it-for-you solution,” he says, then concluding how AI will evolve and get better and he looks forward to the improvements that will be made over time.

Though Morgan also believes that AI is powerful and has come a long way in a short amount of time, she says “I think there’s still something inherently human in a lot of the engineering that you do…there are engineering decisions and judgments that humans make. Something imperfect is purposely included because the design is, therefore, more human, more manufacturable, or more usable.” So while she doesn’t see AI doing the design work any time soon, she does think that AI could take over a lot of automation like in math, analysis processes and design edits.

Check out our previous episode recap of our AI episode, AI-Enabled CAD: Enhancing Design Efficiency with Siemens’ NX, to learn about some of the AI-enabled capabilities in NX that help engineers to be more productive and reduce inefficiencies. Similar to Drew’s wish of giving a prompt to the software, we also recently introduced NX Copilot, powered by Microsoft Azure.

What does the future of design look like to Firefly Aerospace?

Morgan says the next generation of engineers will continue to build with AI and new features and technology that come out, such as Immersive. For herself, she hopes to be like Tony Stark— seeing holograms of a rocket and updating it with a wave of a hand or voice command.

The three close out the episode discussing advice for future aerospace engineers, upcoming Firefly launches including the Blue Ghost which took off January 15th on Falcon 9, the future of human passengers on Firefly spacecraft and if the two engineers would like to go to space themselves. Check out the full episode to learn more.

Continue listening to the Next Generation Design podcast.

Want to learn more about NX CAD software? Check out our website or try it for free.

Mollie Gladden
Product Marketing Coordinator

Mollie Gladden joined Siemens in June 2022 as a Marketing Coordinator on the Product Engineering Software (PES) go-to-market team. She is responsible for the NX Academic program, the Next Generation Design podcast and more.

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This article first appeared on the Siemens Digital Industries Software blog at https://blogs.sw.siemens.com/nx-design/firefly-aerospace-rocket-design-cad/