MIDLAND, Texas — A Firehawk Aerospace testing facility touched down in Midland in November 2022.
"In November we broke ground, and we were able to move fast, within about 45 days we were out here testing and now we’ve just finished another successful campaign," said Justin Karl, chief engineer at Firehawk.
Firehawk is horizontally testing small and medium-sized rocket engines. At the facility, the team also works on testing and data, then analyzes everything back at headquarters.
"Here we come out of our headquarters, we integrate our rockets here, all the control for testing is done right here," said Karl. "All the data comes from here. Every once in a while we go back to headquarters and take a look at everything and see what we want to tweak, and that’s what sets up that multi-week cadence. We’ve been out here for a couple weeks. We’ll go home and check on things and run analyses, decide what we want to do next, and come back out."
One project on their list is some work with the military.
"We’ve got a Congressional allocation from the Defense Authorization Act budget, and we’re gonna do some flight testing for the Air Force," said Karl. "So the engines that you see here at this site are gonna be put on a diet, scaled down for flight, and then looks like by the end of this calendar year we’ll be doing some flying for the Air Force so they can access our capabilities."
According to Karl, since landing here, the Permian Basin has had a positive impact on them.
"I always like to express that being out in the Permian basin area, it’s not just a winner by a nose as far as development goes," said Karl. "Everything out here is far above and beyond our expectations for partnerships, so we’re very thankful Midland itself has been a major enabling factor in the crazy amount of success we had."