Firehawk Aerospace wants to 3-D print rocket fuel and is moving to Dallas to join the space race - The Dallas Morning News

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Rocket engine startup Firehawk Aerospace is moving to Dallas to grow its 3-D printed rocket fuel concept and join the space race as Texas becomes a growing hub in the commercial rocket world.

Firehawk is looking for space for its primary research facility in the Dallas-Fort Worth area after getting $1.2 million in investment funding from local startup fund Harlow Capital Management and CEO Colby Harlow.

The company is moving from Florida’s Space Coast, where Kennedy Space Center has long been a magnet for commercial space research.

But that is quickly shifting as companies such as SpaceX, Blue Origin and Firefly are growing in the Lone Star State and the new generation of multi-billionaire space magnates look for a future beyond the government confines of NASA.

Just this week, the focus of the space exploration world once again focused on Texas and Boca Chica beach as SpaceX tested its Starship concept with a test launch to 10 kilometers that ended in a spectacular explosion as the rocketship tried to land. And last month, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos’ rocket company Blue Origin declared its 14th rocket launch in West Texas “a wholly successful mission” that moves human flight “one step closer.”

“We want to tap into everything that’s going on here in Texas and really provide Dallas with a new kind of company,” said Firehawk Aerospace CEO Will Edwards.

Firehawk uses 3-D printing technology to make a hybrid style rocket engine, which it says is simpler, cheaper and more stable than traditional solid-fuel style rockets used in space exploration so far. The company says its fuels can be loaded earlier onto rockets and can be stored for months or years at a time.

The kind of explosions that SpaceX has demonstrated during its research phases wouldn’t be possible with a Firehawk-style rocket engine, Edwards said.

A rocket engine test by 3-D printing startup Firehawk Aerospace, which plans to relocate to Texas after getting $1.2 million in investment funding from Dallas' Harlow Capital Management.(Courtesy Firehawk)

Firehawk is still in its early stages, but the company considers its technology to be promising. It has conducted tests with 200 and 500 pounds of thrust and are working on an engine with 5,000 pounds of thrust. That’s small compared with the 1.2 million pounds of thrust used to launch the Space Shuttle or the 1.9 million pounds on SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket. But Firehawk says the technology can easily be scaled up.

“We’ve been able to eliminate some of the historical shortcomings of hybrid rockets,” said company founder and chief scientist Ron Jones. “Our fuel is much denser than liquid fuels and our engines are less expensive to develop.”

The engines could also have potential military applications. That’s another reason North Texas is an attractive landing spot for Firehawk with Lockheed Martin operating a major rocket and missile technology and manufacturing center in Grand Prairie and Raytheon Technologies’ space and airborne systems business based in McKinney.

“We have some prospective clients and they vary between defense-type operations and commercial space flight,” Jones said. “What we’ve discovered is that they are not in Florida.”

Florida does have a robust space industry, but companies such as SpaceX and Blue Origin primarily have manufacturing facilities there to keep their big rockets close to the launch center at Kennedy Space Center. SpaceX is headquartered near Los Angeles International Airport in Hawthorne, Calif., and Blue Origin’s base is in Kent, Wash., near Seattle.

Firehawk Aerospace headquarters in Melbourne, Fla. The company is planning to soon relocate to North Texas to design and manufacture its 3-D printed rocket engines.(Courtesy Firehawk)

Of course, space rocket companies come in all shapes and sizes. SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rockets are among the biggest ever developed, but Firefly, which is based outside of Austin in Cedar Park, is developing rockets for small and medium-sized payloads. Its larger engines have about 40,000 pounds of thrust and are combined to reach the kind of power needed to get into space.

Firehawk’s rockets could be put into use on smaller engines in as little as 15 months, Edwards said.

One big key, Jones said, is that the rockets and the printing technology are easily modified, allowing rockets to be designed and built in just a few months for custom applications.

Firehawk is working on moving operations to Dallas and looking at opening another facility in Oklahoma, hoping to take advantage of that state’s aerospace manufacturing capabilities.

The company plans on doing research, design and manufacturing of rockets.

“We intend to draw aerospace engineering graduates, so we think that Dallas is one of the best places to locate,” Edwards said.

The company is considering spaces in the Plano-Richardson area, he said. It’s now in the process of moving its small research team from Florida and hiring about 20 more researchers and developers in North Texas.

Harlow, who runs Harlow Capital Management, said his firm put the $1.2 million into Firehawk because the company demonstrated its product has high growth potential.

“Space has been very popular in the last couple of years with a lot of big-name investors from Elon Musk to Jeff Bezos,” Harlow said. “Because the engine technology can be so uniformly shared across the industry, it can be modified to work with any company.”

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Firehawk Aerospace wants to 3-D print rocket fuel and is moving to Dallas to join the space race - The Dallas Morning News
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