Firefly Aerospace Lights Birthday Candles With a Rocket Engine
Firefly Aerospace team, which is one of the space-tech contractors NASA selected to help it get back to the Moon, has shown what can happen when imaginative engineers decide to throw a birthday party — and it was probably a good time for everyone except for the poor cake.
The video starts with Firefly's other co-founder, Tom Markusic, trying very hard to light birthday candles. Contemplating life, he says, "They melt. They burn you. It's actually a pretty difficult problem. To solve the problem, we've devised a rather unique solution to light all of the candles at once."
Well, it was a unique solution indeed. The team used one of its rocket engines to try to light the pesky candles at the same time for its co-founder Max Polakov's birthday.
Watching the team working to get everything right and firing the engine in a sequence that resembles a rocket launch is just extremely entertaining. The cake ends up being charred and burned beyond recognition; however, one single candle, which was probably added afterward, remains in the end.
It probably wasn't tasty, but the team's enthusiasm made up for it.