more than one thing
Firefly’s majority owner is private equity firm AE Industrial Partners, and the Series D funding round was led by Michigan-based RPM Ventures.
“There are very few companies that can say they’ve defined a new category in their industry, and Firefly is one of them,” said Mark Weiser, managing director at RPM Ventures. “They have captured a niche in the market as a full-service provider of highly responsive space missions and have become the pinnacle of modern space and defense technology companies.”
This descriptor (full service provider) is what sets Firefly apart from most other space companies. Firefly’s efforts in areas such as small and medium-sized launch vehicles, rocket engines, lunar landers, and space propulsion devices have propelled the company into a broad club of commercial space companies that probably only includes SpaceX, Blue Origin, and Rocket Lab. I am.
NASA has awarded Firefly three task orders under the Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) program. Firefly will soon ship its first lunar lander, Blue Ghost, to Florida in final preparations for launch and delivery of 10 NASA-sponsored science instruments and technology demonstration experiments to the lunar surface. is. NASA has a contract with Firefly for a second Blue Ghost mission, as well as a contract for Firefly to carry a European data relay satellite into lunar orbit.
Firefly also boasts a healthy backlog of missions on its Alpha rocket. In June, Lockheed Martin announced a deal to launch up to 25 Alphas through 2029. Two months later, L3Harris signed a contract with Firefly for up to 20 Alpha launches. Firefly also has Alpha launch contracts with NASA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the Space Force, and the National Reconnaissance Office. One of these Alpha launches will deploy Firefly’s first orbital transport vehicle, called Elytra, designed to host a customer’s payload and transport it to a different orbit after separation from the launcher’s upper stage.
And then there’s the medium-sized rocket, a rocket that Firefly and Northrop Grumman hope to launch as early as 2026. But first, the companies will fly an MLV booster stage powered by seven kerosene-fueled Miranda engines on a new version of Northrop Grumman’s cargo Antares rocket. Delivery to the International Space Station. Northrop Grumman retired the previous version of the Antares after losing access to Russian rocket engines following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
