Podcasts

Voyaging to the Moon: Rocket Design with Firefly Aerospace

How do you design a rocket capable of reaching the moon? What role do AI and sustainability play in shaping the future of aerospace? 

In 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.

Whether you’re an aerospace enthusiast or curious about the intersection of design and technology, this episode is packed with insights that will fuel your imagination about the next frontier.

What you’ll learn in this episode of the Next Generation Design podcast:

  • What is Firefly Aerospace, and what do they do? (1:05)
  • Using CAD software and Siemens’ NX in aerospace design (6:50)
  • What are the challenges engineers face daily in the design process at Firefly Aerospace? (11:15)
  • The future of sustainability in aerospace design and engineering (26:35)
  • The future role of the industrial metaverse and immersive engineering in rocket design (34:15)
  • How does Firefly Aerospace use AI in the design process (38:40)
  • What does the future of design look like? (43:35)

You can always listen to the Next Generation Design podcast right here, or wherever you do podcasts.

Read the summary or watch the video version of this episode: How Firefly Aerospace designs rockets for space travel | NX CAD for Aerospace

Listen to or read the next episode of the Next Generation Design podcast: Digitalizing the Construction industry with Building Information Modeling (BIM) Releasing Tuesday, February 18, 2025

Listen to or read the previous episode of the Next Generation Design podcast: Digital Engineering Modular Aircraft at AERALIS

With CAD and NX, you can actually put something on the screen that someone can look at, and you can kind of fly around in 3D space, and you can get kind of a visual aid to help with what you’re trying to say or the design you’re trying to sell... anyone can look at it and get a visual representation of the design that we’re trying to realize.

Morgan Feanny, Aerospace/Mechanical Structures Engineer, Firefly Aerospace

Connect with Greg Arnot

Connect with Morgan Feanny

Connect with Drew Summers


Podcast Transcript for Voyaging to the Moon: Rocket Design with Firefly Aerospace

Morgan Feanny: It’s not an easy science. But I think that’s a major component of why it is so exciting and fulfilling is because we’re developing something for the first time to explore this frontier. It hasn’t been fully realized yet. I’m never bored. There’s always something new to solve and a new problem to fix. I’ve already learned so much. Every hardship you pass on the way in this industry just makes you a better engineer and a better problem solver. You think better, you solve problems better, and you approach things with a better attitude. Maybe it’s rockets for you, or maybe it’s something else like drones, helicopters, or planes in aerospace. I’ve been checking bucket list items off the list that I didn’t even know I had.

Greg Arnot: You’re listening to another episode of the Next Generation Design podcast. I’m your host, Greg Arnot. On today’s episode, I’m joined by two engineers at Firefly Aerospace, a private aerospace company that focuses 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. Before we begin, let’s meet today’s guests: Drew Summers, a lead structures engineer, and Morgan Feanny, a primary structures responsible engineer. Morgan, Drew, welcome to the show. 

Morgan Feanny: Thanks for having us.

Drew Summers: Thanks for having us.

Greg Arnot: We’re very happy to have you. First, I’d like to start by giving our listeners a bit of background on Firefly Aerospace. What is the company really known for?

Morgan Feanny: Firefly Aerospace was founded in 2017. We specialize in launch vehicles and spacecraft. So, we’ve got two rocket lines. One of them is in development, and the other is our flight-proven Alpha vehicle. In our spacecraft, we’ve got a lunar lander that is flying later this year for the first time, and we’ve got an orbital tug called Elytra that’s in development as well, also flying later this year. I think our Flight 7 is our first Elytra flight. It’s an internal payload deployment just to test stuff around with the NRO, do some on-orbit maneuvering, that kind of stuff.

Greg Arnot: Wow, it sounds like you have some very exciting technology in development! Can you walk us through your time at Firefly? Where did each of you start? 

Drew Summers: I went to the University of Alabama for my degree in aerospace engineering. I joined Firefly as a design intern in 2018 and then came back every summer afterwards. I finished my master’s in 2021 and started full-time shortly after that. I’ve been working for about three years full-time. I’ve worked on pretty much every program across Firefly, from Alpha to Blue Ghost to Elytra. Now, I’m currently a responsible engineer for the engine bay segment of our medium launch vehicle.

Morgan Feanny: I graduated from Texas A&M in 2021 with a mechanical engineering and manufacturing degree. I always hoped to work in space, but I graduated with mechanical just so I could go into any industry that I wanted because it’s a little bit more broad. I started applying to jobs and landed at Firefly a couple of months after I graduated and started two or so weeks after their first flight, Flight One. So yeah, it’s been two and a half, going on three years, this coming September. What I’m responsible for here has changed over time. At Firefly, we’ve had a lot of growth, and you kind of have to wear a lot of hats. At the moment, I am a responsible engineer for a lot of our primary or pressurized structures on Alpha and MLV, which is our development medium-class launch vehicle. So yeah, I’m just kind of the point of contact for manufacturing, any design changes that have to happen, testing, inspections, everything up to the handoff for launch.

Greg Arnot: And did you always know that you wanted to be an aerospace engineer?

Morgan Feanny: Yeah, at least for me, the private space sector, at least when I was a kid, had still not really fully formed yet. I know SpaceX was doing stuff back then and a couple of other companies as well, but it wasn’t like a viable career path. Back when I was a kid, if you wanted to do space, it was like NASA, and that was it. So, I always loved NASA. I always thought that I would never be smart enough to work at NASA. So yeah, I always did love space and wanted to go into it and just got lucky with how things worked out.

Greg Arnot: Well, I hope you stay lucky.

Morgan Feanny: Yeah, me too. 

Greg Arnot: And Drew, what about you? Was this a childhood dream?

Drew Summers: I don’t know if I always knew. I thought it was the most interesting by far out of the available, like, mechanical engineering. I think I knew I wanted to be a mechanical engineer, but then, since aerospace is like a specific subset of that, it seemed the most interesting. I think I even got really lucky with it, too, because I grew up here in Austin. It was the same kind of thing. I always thought that NASA would be the career path I would go into. But whenever I was growing up, I heard that there was this company, Firefly Aerospace, coming into town. It was like, “There’s no way there’s an aerospace company here in Austin,” so I got to be in my hometown and doing what I love.

Morgan Feanny: Yeah, most other space companies in Texas are kind of in the middle of nowhere, so it’s kind of nice to be working in a city where you can actually live close to civilization.

Greg Arnot: Yes, that’s certainly an important factor. You’ve each been at Firefly for a few years now, can you give me a feel for how you’ve seen the aerospace industry change in that period of time?  How are you seeing the industry evolve?

Morgan Feanny: So, carrying back to what I said about how NASA was kind of your only option, at least when we were kids, it was kind of the only viable option for a space career. At least when I started, going on three years ago, space startups were everywhere. They were kind of not a dime a dozen, but basically, if you had a cool or promising idea back then, the market hadn’t reached this more established place where you could enter into the market and find people who would want to work with you.

Drew Summers: Because as long as once you really had a cool idea, and youwe were able to sell it to investors and raise the capital to do it, it was really easy to have a company.

Morgan Feanny: But since then, the competition’s gotten a lot more established over time. There have been some competitors cut from the market as a healthy market does. Nowadays, it’s a lot harder to enter the market with great ideas alone. So, you have to have something tangible by this point. At least, that’s what I’ve seen. You have to have flown test rockets, or you have to have a working prototype or really good investor backing. And that’s kind of what’s needed nowadays. You can’t really just enter into the market.

Drew Summers: Like you mentioned, a demonstration of capability, less so just the idea alone.

Morgan Feanny: Yeah, people are getting more picky because they can be nowadays. People, as in investors.

Greg Arnot: Switching gears a bit, I’d like to get into the design side of things. What does that overall design process look like at Firefly? I wonder if you can walk me through from concept all the way through to launch.

Drew Summers: It usually starts with just a whiteboard discussion, making some sketches. You have the problem statement; you know what you want to do. Like, “I want to redesign this component. I want to mount this thing to this other thing. I want to make this lighter. I want to refine how this works.” Based on that, you can do your early sketches and have some discussions and meetings with people to figure out what your boundary conditions are, what your constraints are, what materials are available, and what your budget is. Then, from there, you can build your preliminary CAD model. As the design matures and with further discussions, meetings, and design reviews, you can refine that CAD model throughout the whole process.

Morgan Feanny: The whole iterative design thing really is, at least at Firefly, how we design. You do have to make something physical at some point to validate all the math and the analysis that goes into all the assumptions that you’ve been making throughout the design process. Then, you carefully install this very expensive hardware onto a test stand. Maybe a joint needs redesigning because it failed in a previous test. Maybe something is way too heavy, and we need to cut mass costs because we have a payload that needs to go into a deeper orbit or it’s a heavier payload. After, you just kind of run through this iterative design process. The iterative design process doesn’t have to be physical all the time. You can run different analysis models and CAD models and keep building virtually.

Drew Summers: That’s where the design trades really come in. Especially with preliminary design, that’s where you’d have your different design trades in your 3D space to validate which one you want to go with for a fully fleshed-out design.

Morgan Feanny: Yeah, and then it’s just a matter of paperwork. I say “paperwork,” but that’s really summarizing a lot of the regulation side and the mission management side very crudely. It’s a matter of finding somebody who wants to fly to space on this design and then just making it happen.

Greg Arnot: Given that we are on the Next Generation Design Podcast from the NX CAD team, I’m wondering if you’ve seen any benefits to using CAD and NX in the design process at Firefly? What would you say has had the biggest impact there?

Morgan Feanny: With CAD and NX, you can actually put something on screen that someone can look at. You can kind of fly around in 3D space and get a visual aid to help with what you’re trying to say or the design you’re trying to sell. You can CAD up really quickly, update really quickly, and share really quickly something that can be reviewed by anyone in the company– it’ll be slapped up on Teamcenter. Anyone can look at it and get a visual representation of the design we’re trying to realize. The fact that you can do this so quickly, and it’s integrated with Teamcenter really nicely, where access is not really an issue for anyone in the company if they have an account, that’s probably the biggest impact of CAD—you can actually see what you’re working on. It’s a lot quicker than back when people had to draw things on paper, and you couldn’t really fly around in 3D space to see what the backside of that looks like. But you can do that now.

Drew Summers: Especially with structures, where we have a lot of mating interfaces and have to worry about clearance with other components. Being able to visualize what that clearance is and have a good first guess of what it’s going to be is a huge help for making sure because that’s going to work.

Morgan Feanny: Yeah, you can virtually cut something in half to look at a joint. You couldn’t do that otherwise. 

Greg Arnot: I imagine you’re dealing with very complex assemblies. Does NX help you with that?

Drew Summers: Oh, for sure. The biggest thing that it helps with is the load settings. One of them allows it to load only the part of the vehicle we want to see. Especially if we have a massive assembly where the entire vehicle is loaded all at once, whereas if you loaded it by itself, it would take forever, but if you just need one particular part of a segment, you can just load that area, and it’s much, much faster to work and get what you need.

Morgan Feanny: We did have some challenges with our old design software, being able to open up an entire Alpha. One of the challenges we struggled with was you couldn’t have dissimilar materials in one part; it had to be an assembly, which is kind of a challenge. Structures at Firefly are a sandwich laminate. You have a laminate, then a piece of core, and then another laminate that squishes it all together, and that’s one piece that we lay up in one go. In CAD, we want to have that represented as just one part, but our previous software required that the first laminate had to be its own part, the core had to be its own part, and the other laminate had to be its own part.

Drew Summers: We had a lot of weird workarounds to make that process work, but now with NX, it’s fully streamlined. It’s easier to do those kinds of parts.

Morgan Feanny: That’s only from a structure’s perspective. I’m sure there are all kinds of things in propulsion, avionics, and fluids that have something similar if they’ve got a part with multiple different metals or something.

Drew Summers: Yeah because we had a[inaudible] bBi-metallic welded joint, where even that one,. The fact that we had NX able to do that was a huge help.

Morgan Feanny: That was pretty big. Yeah, part complexity is huge here. Rockets are complex.

Greg Arnot: Were there any other reasons for the move to NX?

Drew Summers: I think all the stuff we just mentioned were the biggest thingschanges. I will say some of the more advanced features that NX has were a huge help. Synchronous modeling is probably the greatest CAD feature I’ve ever seen. It’s so useful. It’s great. 

Greg Arnot: I like it, too!

Drew Summers: Especially with the whole iterative process, if you have a STEP file where it’s just a solid body and you want to do some quick and dirty, like move a feature, delete a filletit, fill it, resize something, and to just be able to do that on the fly without fully rebuilding the model, it’s so useful.

Greg Arnot: All this talk about CAD and NX, how were you both introduced to CAD software and to NX? 

Drew Summers: I actually got introduced to CAD software pretty early on. So, in high school, my sophomore year, I had an intro to engineering class where we got to learn Autodesk Inventor. I kept on learning that software. I was part of SkillsUSA, a technical drafting club, as nerdy as that sounds, it ended up being super useful because I got to learn CAD software all the way through high school and college. It really helped coming into Firefly, where, as a design intern, my primary role was to work in CAD software, doing models and drawings.

Morgan Feanny: Kind of a similar vein for me. I started in college; we used mostly SolidWorks. We used a ton of different CAD software, but that’s the one that sticks out most in memory. CAD softwares aren’tisn’t super similar. They’ve got the same kind of basic core principles. When I started at Firefly, we had just made a transition from our previous CAD software to NX. It was just kind of a first introduction to a more engineering-facing design software, I’d call it. It was almost less UI-friendly, but it had a bigger suite of tools to do the job.

Greg Arnot: Since you’ve spent quite a bit of time with the technology, do you have any advice for those trying to learn NX for the first time?

Drew Summers: For me, if you’re familiar with a different CAD software and you’re switching to NX, rebinding your keyboard shortcuts was a huge help for just learning the program and getting familiar with it. After doing that, it was just like using any other software I’ve done.

Morgan Feanny: Yeah, NX is very much an engineer’s software. When I first started learning NX, it was a bit like drinking from a fire hose. All the tools you need are there, but there are so many options to do so many different things, and you don’t know exactly what you want to do and what tool you need to do it. It just takes some playing around with the UI to figure out what tool you need to use when, what you’re looking for, and where it’s found. But even some of their stuff with surface modeling is some of the coolest stuff that I use.

Drew Summers: It’s really just exploring the software and figuring out, “Hey, I want to do this thing. Let’s see if NX has it.” And usually, it does. So, it would be an easy way to learn.

Greg Arnot: Getting back to your business, I wonder if you can tell me what challenges are the most common in aerospace? Are there particular challenges you face pertaining to regulations?

Morgan Feanny: At least in the aerospace industry itself, regulations are always something that you have to follow just for the general safety of everybody involved. Regulations are good, but it is something that you understand going into it. It’s like, “Okay, well, we need to follow this set of rules in order to play the game.” So, in terms of challenges, I would say that the rapid development pacing, especially something that’s closer to a startup, is a little bit challenging because 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. 

Greg Arnot: And from a day-to-day point of view, what are some of the pain points that Firefly has in the product development process? I can imagine this must be an incredibly hard and unforgiving environment to design for.

Drew Summers: The hardest thing that we deal with day-to-day is just the iterative process. Especially with something where we’ve never done it before, the lessons we learned from a previous experience may not translate one-to-one. So, we can have all the lessons learned and have that experience going into it, but it’s not a one-and-done kind of “we know exactly what we’re doing.” So there is a lot of trial and error that comes with that. 

Morgan Feanny: And keeping up the momentum while you’re doing that. When we “scaled,” our Alpha rocket is about six feet in diameter, and that’s the one that we’ve flight-proven. Our in-development medium-class launch vehicle is about 14 feet in diameter. So, a lot of people were just kind of like, “Well, yeah, you just scale up what you currently have, right? Like, you just make it bigger.” Saying, “Yeah, just make it bigger,” does sound a lot easier than it is.

Drew Summers: Yeah, it sounds great on paper, like that’s the easiest path forward, just building off existing knowledge. But as things get bigger, it gets more expensive. We have our engineering motto of “build fast, break fast,” where, if suddenly something’s really big and really expensive, it’s a lot harder to build it fast and break it fast.

Morgan Feanny: And you don’t want to break it. It’s similar, but not the same. Sometimes, even though the structure on Alpha looks like this, we might find out through testing that it looks completely different on our bigger rocket. So, the challenges and pain points in the development process ring true the most right now with our bigger vehicle because that’s what we’re currently developing. That’s where we’re currently learning all of our lessons in, and having to design not really from scratch because we have best practices and lessons learned to roll.

Drew Summers: That’s most valuable thing we’ve had is just those lessons learned. But the fact that it’s not the easiest possible thing to transition one to the other, that can be where it gets hard. 

Morgan Feanny: Yeah, it’s not a one-to-one.

Greg Arnot: Those are valuable insights that both of you have shared, especially about lessons learned. What can you tell me about collaboration at Firefly? How important is collaboration across different disciplines and engineering domains?

Drew Summers: It’s a huge part of what we do. Going back to when we mentioned Teamcenter, everybody across the company has access to view our CAD and our drawings and be able to reference anything we’re talking about for design reviews. It makes it so easy to collaborate with people across different departments and even across different facilities. Most of our engineering is done in our headquarters in Cedar Park, but we have our test site about 40 minutes north of our main office and then out in Vandenberg, where our test site is as well, so everybody can collaborate on the same information at the same time. It’s a huge help for keeping us moving.

Morgan Feanny: It is nice having a manufacturing facility so close to headquarters, but it’s a blessing and a curse. If anything at all goes wrong, they’re like, “Hey, can you come up here?” It can be derailing from your usual work. So, it’s really nice to be able to say, “Hey, let’s jump on a Teams call and share our screen.” We can both pull up the same model and look at the same things– across departments as well. For us, when we have a CAD assembly,  when structures stops owning it is the second we hand it off to integration and fluids. We’re not fully done, but they are able to take our structural model and add all the other things they need to it. So, fluid systems or, like you said, electrical wiring can also be included at a later assembly stage in the process.

Greg Arnot: And do all of your engineers on the project work in the Cedar Park office? Or is there remote collaboration, as well?

Morgan Feanny: Most of our offices and things are in Texas. We’re split between Texas and California right now. We’ve got our headquarters in Cedar Park. We have a spacecraft facility, which is semi-standalone because they don’t deal with launch vehicles, also in Cedar Park, just five minutes away. Then, we’ve got our manufacturing and test facility up in Bertram, where a lot of our manufacturing engineers are. We also have some dedicated engineering out in California, with some dedicated pad workers technicians and engineers in Vandenberg. So, yeah, we do work remotely a little bit but it’s mostly in-person. If I had have a question, I can walk over to Drew and say, “Hey, can we look at this?”

Greg Arnot: Before we go, I want to talk a bit about the future of aerospace engineering. How do you foresee the aerospace industry evolving–specifically, something I personally find very interesting and is a priority for many companies, including Siemens? Going forward, do you see aerospace becoming more sustainable? Is there anything out there right now that could help space travel become more sustainable? 

Morgan Feanny: The market is becoming more established, especially in the private launch sector. Companies are starting to hone their approach to appeal more to customers. That’s, for the moment, it’s customers who can pay because space is still very expensive. But as you move towards sustainability and reusability, you start to be able to cut costs because you don’t have to make your thing from the ground up every single time. It cuts down on labor costs like crazy, cuts down on lead time for materials, and cuts down a lot of the pain that goes into making a brand-new thing. For private space companies, that means more vehicle lines, more options to go into deeper, further orbits, reusable stage ones, even reusable stage twos, recoverable fairings, all that kind of thing. Composites and lightweight — we’re biased because we work at a company that works with composites and we’re structure engineers.

Drew Summers: Yeah, Firefly flight—we do mostly carbon fiber stuff.

Morgan Feanny: Carbon fiber is kind of in line with, in my mind, a younger company. In terms of reusability, at least when you’re first starting up, it is very expensive to design for reusability right off the bat. So, if you’re just trying to throw a rocket up there because you’re starting your company and need to prove to investors that you can fly, you typically don’t target reusability from the beginning because it’s so expensive and incredibly complex. There’s a natural segue where you become established enough with non-reusable vehicles and then pivot towards reusability. Maybe with a new vehicle line, or you take an existing vehicle design and make it reusable if it’s economically viable. It is not always economically viable to make a vehicle reusable. Unfortunately, sSometimes, it’s just easier and cheaper to make something new and then throw it away and make a new one again.

Greg Arnot: How would that actually work in practice? Would you need to have a GPS tracker on it to recover and reuse the first or second stage? 

Morgan Feanny: Well, there’s a lot of math that goes into the orbital mechanics of when you actually put something up there and where it will come down. You have to pick an orbit, pick a time it’s up in space, and pick a deorbit trajectory that, A, doesn’t land on anybody because that would be awful—you’re looking to splash down in the ocean—and B, you should be able to calculate within a certain diameter where it’s actually going to be. So, yeah, there are GPS and things like that, and they definitely help. But the math is already there to tell you where your rocket is going to splash down.

Drew Summers: All of that is finely controlled and monitored as well. It’s not just Firefly internally keeping track of where it’s at; our regulatory agencies also ensure it’s going in the right place.

Morgan Feanny: There are agencies that keep track of every single satellite that’s up there or anything like a rocket body that’s coming back to Earth. They keep track of where it’s going to be and all that.

Greg Arnot: And do they float once they touch down? They don’t just sink in five minutes?

Morgan Feanny: If it’s still intact when it comes back, I kind of think it would float because the tanks are carrying a large volume of something less dense than water.

Drew Summers: I’m sure as well, if their goal was to target it floating, they would engineer a solution to ensure that it floats. They’d take some of the uncertainty out of that.

Morgan Feanny: So far, we haven’t recovered our stage one. Maybe that’s a path in the future. 

Greg Arnot: Very interesting developments. We’ll have to pay attention to that space moving forward. Besides the sustainability side of things, what is Firefly doing to adapt to new demands or trends?

Drew Summers: Pioneering carbon fiber structures. That’s been Firefly’s main selling point—a fully composite rocket. So, lighter materials, better-performing rockets.

Morgan Feanny: When you have lighter structures, you can lift either more propellant or more payload. You can either make your payload cheaper, or you can achieve deeper orbits, like deeper LEO orbits, or something even beyond if you’re targeting something like a moon launch. It’s very expensive to take any mass to space because it takes a lot of propellant and work to get there. And if you’re going to somewhere like the moon, it’s even further, so  it’s even more expensive. So, for us, we’re starting out with carbon fiber because less of your structure is a dry mass on the rockets. You can put things up there a little cheaper or further. We’ve got some other plans in the works that align with what we think is the best business model. 

Greg Arnot: You might have heard a lot lately about Industrial Metaverse and Immersive Engineering. They’re definitely both trending topics. Do you see the design process at Firefly benefitting from immersive tools?

Drew Summers: Yeah, I think it would be a huge benefit if we had a system like that online, especially for integration and production planning, like the layout of manufacturing facilities. But I don’t know if it’s necessarily worth the investment at the moment, considering we’re still ramping up to full-scale production. 

Morgan Feanny: I could see AR being really interesting. Especially, as you mentioned that we’re trying to scale up, we’re also growing like crazy in terms of employees so there’s a lot of training that needs to happen, and you don’t necessarily want to train someone on a flight vehicle where everything’s critical. So, I could see AR and VR as training solutions being really cool. Or even when you’re making it, a skilled technician could have some sort of AR tech showing exactly where this bolt hole is supposed to be drilled. That would be very cool, or something for production planning. But personally, I haven’t really thought about it that much. We’ve been relying on the old, reliable ways of CAD and collaboration and in-person testing to do a lot of that work. 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.

Drew Summers: It’s something we could grow into. As the company grows, we would grow alongside it. It would be really useful for training, production planning, and layout like you mentioned.

Morgan Feanny: If you were to visit our test facility, you’d walk into any given building and see someone building something, attaching something to something else, or drilling something somewhere. There’s something called a non-conformance report when something in manufacturing doesn’t go perfectly according to the drawing or work instructions. I could see a lot of that being mitigated with the use of something like Immersive Engineering or the industrial Metaverse. Like, “Hey, you’re five degrees off on that bolt hole. You should do it here,.” and then a circle appears. I feel like we’re talking about science fiction right now, but that technology is really cool, the technologies out there.

Greg Arnot: Do you think Firefly might find the upcoming Sony XR head-mounted display for Immersive Engineering and design helpful? I imagine that really visualizing large designs like rockets could be helpful in an immersive environment.

Drew Summers: As far as the immersive experience goes, especially if it’s already included with NX, that actually seems really helpful for what we’re trying to do. If all we need is a headset to see the model in real-time scale and space, being able to visualize the size of the part, how big it is—especially with our bigger vehicle—some of these parts are massive. Getting a sense of scale, and whether a crane is needed, or if multiple people can move it, or if you have clearance to actually get inside the space to install the part, that’s where it’s going to be very helpful. Before you get to the actual manufacturing space and realize, “Hey, that might be harder than I thought.”

Morgan Feanny: One of my favorite stories to tell is when I was first starting out and hadn’t been up to the manufacturing facility yet. I was designing this component panel that we mount a bunch of avionics and things to. On the screen, it looked like the size of a dinner plate. Then I went up to our manufacturing facility, and our rocket is a six-foot diameter rocket, so this “dinner plate” is really a six-foot diameter dinner plate. Sometimes you do lose that sense of scale when you’re sitting behind a desk. 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 more meetings I sit in for various software we use, the more I realize we’re paying for a lot of features that many of us don’t know we have access to. I didn’t know we had access to the adaptive stuff. I would have been using that this whole time if I knew we did. So, it just takes more playing around in NX and seeing what you have access to, to really hone your personal design process.

Greg Arnot: I think you both might find it very interesting then! And another thot topic–  what about AI? Has Firefly begun to integrate AI into the design process?

Drew Summers: At least in the past, we’ve explored some things. The most AI-focused design thing we’ve done was generative design. We used it in the past; I tried to give it a test drive. I think it still has quite a ways to go before it ends up being a fully-fledged, useful piece of technology. Back when I was working on Blue Ghost, we were exploring a mounting bracket to prove out the generative design technology and show something that looks really cool and optimized. But the biggest issue was it didn’t take into account anything beyond just making a functional design. So, it was just considering that and not necessarily how to manufacture it, how to integrate it, cost, budget, or anything like that. We did this bracket design, took a look at it, and almost ordered it. It ended up being well over $1,000 for a single bracket. Meanwhile, we had an alternative design that was just bent sheet metal, and it was less than $100. It was roughly equivalent in weight, maybe a few grams heavier, but the complexity savings and how simple it was to integrate, and you know that the bracket is going to do because you ought to visualizevisualzie easily what it was doing, made it much more worth it in that particular instance. But I think as AI grows and gets more capable, it will end up being 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.

Morgan Feanny: I think AI is an incredibly powerful tool, and it’s come a really long way in a really short amount of time. Going back to generative design– Iin college, we did generative design in labs, and it comes out with this funky-looking, organic shape, where it’s theoretically the most efficient and the coolest-looking thing. But it would be so expensive, like Drew said, to manufacture it. I think there’s still something inherently human in a lot of the engineering that you do—engineering that anybody does, just engineering, period. And I think AI is a long way off from being able to take the reins on that a little bit more. For example, 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. If a computer were to look at it and say, “No, that’s not nearly as efficient as it needs to be,” but like you said, a metal sheet bracket for $50 compared to some crazy 3D-printed $1,500 bracket.

Drew Summers: With generative design, a lot of your inputs come with uncertainty as well. If it optimizes for whatever load case you give it, but there’s any uncertainty in that load case, generative design is not accounting for that uncertainty. So, it may be optimized for what you assume to go in, but what’s actually the bracket component needs to withstand could be quite different.

Morgan Feanny: I think AI could do a really good job in taking over a lot of the automation. In a lot of ways, it already has. I don’t know how much AI is included in the synchronous modeling stuff, but you move a face of a body, and the software just kind of adapts around it. Sometimes it works, and sometimes it doesn’t. I think a lot of the automation of the math behind things, analysis processes, and actually CADing something in NX—like saying, “Hey, I don’t want that hole there anymore,” and then the software just fills it in normally without creating some weird, funky geometry somewhere else. The technology is not quite where we would want it at Firefly for the moment.

Drew Summers: But it’s also interesting too because I know we just kind of spent a bit roasting generative design, but that’s also the worst it’s ever going to be, and it’s only improving at an incredible pace. It’s going to be so exciting to see where it ends up just a year from now, even less.

Morgan Feanny: It’s moving so quickly that it’s too fast for the news almost.

Greg Arnot: Now you’ve got me curious: what does the future of design look like to you?

Morgan Feanny: I could be Tony Stark, and that’s kind of all I’m thinking about right now. That is my peak. When we get to that point, I can retire and be happy. If I could sit at my desk, wave my hands around, make holograms of a rocket, and rapidly be able to say, “Nope, I want it looking like this,” and just update it, that’s where I’d like to be. But in all seriousness, I do think that the next generation of engineers will continue to build. Not only aerospace engineers, but software engineers can continue to develop AI and things like that.

Greg Arnot: What would you say to someone looking to start a career in aerospace engineering?

Drew Summers: I would say, just go for it. I mean, it’s incredibly hard, but I think that’s what makes it so rewarding whenever you kind of get in the weeds of it. Yeah, it might be some long nights, it might be some difficult problems to solve, and things may not go very smoothly. But overcoming those challenges feels so rewarding and makes it worth it.

Morgan Feanny: It’s really a competitive market, and it is difficult to not only get started but to stay in it. It’s really hard. It’s not an easy science. But I think that’s, like Drew said, a major component of why it is so exciting and fulfilling is because we’re developing something for the first time to explore this frontier. It has been explored but it hasn’t been fully realized yet. I’m never bored. I have too much to do all the time. There’s always something new to solve and a new problem to fix. I’ve already learned so much. Every hardship you pass on the way in this industry just makes you a better engineer and a better problem solver. You think better, you solve problems better, and you approach things with a better attitude. Maybe it’s rockets for you, or maybe it’s something else like drones, helicopters, or planes in aerospace. I’ve been checking bucket list items off the list that I didn’t even know I had. I have just been like, “Oh, cool. Designed a rocket. Check.”

Greg Arnot: I think that’s truly inspiring. A bit earlier, you mentioned the moon, and now it’s got me wondering: are there any upcoming Firefly launches that you’d like to tell the world about?

Drew Summers: Yeah, we have Blue Ghost coming up. I believe it’s supposed to launch later this year, Q4. And then we have our Flight Six and Seven vehicles coming later this year as well.

Morgan Feanny: Flight Six is a dedicated commercial mission for Lockheed Martin, and Flight Seven is our dedicated mission for the NRO to launch our Elytra orbital tug for the first time. We’re going to be doing some payload deployments with our Elytra vehicle and some on-orbit maneuvering and stuff like that. 

Greg Arnot: And the plan is to go to the moon?

Morgan Feanny: Yeah, to Mare Crisium. 

Drew Summers: I believe so.

Morgan Feanny: I hope I pronounced that correctly.

Drew Summers: I would not have been able to pronounce it correctly, either.

Morgan Feanny: Yeah, that’s Blue Ghost Mission One, flying later this year on a Falcon 9.

Greg Arnot: Do you think Firefly will ever carry human passengers?

Morgan Feanny: It’s always a possibility. We haven’t talked about it yet. Right now, we’re still focused on the commercial payload delivery version of it. But as the industry grows more and more, that is a viable economic path—to deliver people to and from places. At the moment, we haven’t really looked into it. A lot of your design has to change if you’re flying people. You have to have secondary and tertiary redundancies, and you have to have higher safety factors because you’re dealing with human lives. You have to be really careful. Alpha could not translate directly to become a viable path to space for people. We’d have to do lot of design upgrades.

Greg Arnot: What about a relaunch capability? Say, launch on the moon and then come back again?

Morgan Feanny: Yeah, there are things we’re working on. 

Drew Summers: I don’t know if we can share specifics, but I wouldn’t say that’s entirely out of the question.

Morgan Feanny: It’s something that’s been done before by other people, so I don’t see why we couldn’t do it too.

Greg Arnot: And lastly, I wonder if you can tell us: is going to space yourself on your bucket list?

Drew Summers: Yeah, I would say so.

Morgan Feanny: I think it used to be for me. Maybe it still is. I don’t know. After working at a rocket company, it’s kind of like how you don’t want to see behind the kitchen at a restaurant you go to, and you don’t want to see the people that manufacture the cars. That’s kind of how it is for me. Now that I’ve been on the manufacturing and design side of rocketry, it’s lost its allure a teensy bit.

Drew Summers: Speak for yourself. I think it’d be pretty sweet.

Morgan Feanny: I’m just thinking about all the training that goes into being an astronaut as well. I don’t particularly want to take a ride on the vomit comet.

Drew Summers: Yeah, that one may be a little less appealing, but if the opportunity presented itself, I think it’d be something cool to do. It wouldn’t be a long-term career path for sure because I think I’m still very happy manufacturing and designing this stuff.

Morgan Feanny: If someone asked me, “Do you want to go to space tomorrow?” I would probably say yes because you cannot pass up an opportunity like that. So, I guess I take back my answer.

Greg Arnot: Morgan, Drew, we really appreciate your joining us today. It’s been fascinating hearing about the world of aerospace engineering from both of your unique perspectives. I look forward to hearing more from Firefly in the future. Thank you so much again to our guests Morgan and Drew. We hope to speak with you again soon. Thanks also to our listeners for tuning in to today’s episode. Join us next time for more discussions about the latest in design innovation and software applications. If you haven’t already, please consider subscribing to our podcast on your favorite platform. And if you’re enjoying the content, please leave us a review. I’m your host, Greg Arnot, and this has been the Next Generation Design podcast.

Next Generation Design Podcast Podcast

Next Generation Design Podcast

As product engineering tools continue to morph and expand at speeds human expertise may not be able to endure, Revolutionary design technologies that span beyond industry borders, will prove their necessity for companies looking to take over their markets in the future. What will the future of design technologies and machinery look like? What will your digitalization story be? Where engineering meets tomorrow.

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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/podcasts/next-generation-design/rocket-design-cad-firefly-aerospace-moon/