$45.05 +0.33 (+0.74%) As of 04:00 PM Eastern
Firefly Aerospace is a market leading space and defense technology company with an established track record of success providing comprehensive mission solutions to national security, government, and commercial customers. Our mission is to enable responsive, regular, and reliable launch, transit, and operations in space for our customers across the globe. Backed by our world-class team and proven technology, we have designed, developed, and deployed our class-leading launch vehicles and dynamic spacecraft solutions to support critical customer missions across the space domain. As a leader of responsive mission solutions and the only commercial company to achieve a fully successful Moon landing, we are a partner of choice for national security, government, and commercial customers for their critical space missions. As a U.S.-based company, our purpose-built family of products aligns with the ongoing paradigm shift in government missions and procurement processes, where speed, dependability, efficiency, and economics drive customer decision-making. We have a differentiated and scalable platform of Launch and Spacecraft Solutions with flight heritage. Within Launch, we have two offerings built on common technologies: Alpha and Eclipse. Our operational launch vehicle, Alpha, is the first and only U.S.-based orbital rocket in the 1,000 kilograms class to successfully reach orbit, with four launches completed successfully. These successful launches include responsive space missions, which are a significant differentiator for Firefly and a critical national defense solution. Eclipse, a reusable and scaled up version of Alpha, is in final development in partnership with Northrop Grumman and is expected to deliver 16,000-kilogram payloads to Low Earth Orbit (“LEO”) and can access Medium Earth Orbit (“MEO”), Geostationary Orbit (“GEO”), Highly Elliptical Orbit (“HEO”) and Trans-lunar Injection (“TLI”). We expect that Eclipse will first launch from Wallops Island, Virginia, as early as 2026 and it will be able to support space station resupply, commercial spacecraft, critical national security missions, and scientific payloads for the domestic and international markets. --- Our Spacecraft Solutions—our Blue Ghost lander (“Blue Ghost”) and Elytra offerings—highlight the heritage of common technologies from our launch vehicles. Blue Ghost Lander and Elytra are highly maneuverable spacecraft enabled by high performance rocket engine technology. Our Blue Ghost lander is the only commercial vehicle to ever achieve a fully successful Moon landing and the first U.S.- based lander to successfully complete a lunar surface mission since NASA’s Apollo 17 in 1972. We have a flight proven spacecraft that has operated in LEO, MEO, GEO, and Cislunar orbits. Elytra is our high thrust spacecraft platform creating new categories for space domain awareness and warfighting, long-range communications relays, on-orbit edge processing, and advanced space exploration. Elytra is capable of a wide-range of spacecraft missions across multiple orbits, including satellite delivery, on-orbit transfers, hosted payloads, communications relay, and more–which positions us to help establish a dominant U.S. and allied national security position in space. Elytra will support near-term Blue Ghost missions, highlighting both space-readiness and scalability of the underlying technology. Elytra will also support a responsive on-orbit mission for the U.S. Department of Defense’s (the “DoD”) Defense Innovation Unit (“DIU”) and perform multiple Rendezvous Proximity Operations (“RPO”) and space domain awareness operations on-demand. Additionally, we expect to offer a lunar imaging service, named Ocula, through Elytra as early as 2026. These foundational capabilities and underlying technologies form the basis of our responsive, dedicated, and scalable solutions that are evolving alongside the rapidly shifting defense technology and space landscape. --- We operate in a highly attractive and growing industry. According to McKinsey’s report from 2024, the global space economy is projected to reach $1.8 trillion in value by 2035 driven by accelerating national security and commercial demand. In recent years, record demand for satellites caused a supply shortage of orbital launch vehicles. In 2024, nearly 2,800 satellites launched to orbit, representing more than a 500% increase in demand for launch services compared to just five years prior, according to a 2025 report by BryceTech. The scarcity of launch capacity and increasing government and commercial demand has led these customers to seek out defense technology companies with cost-efficient and proven production systems for increasing capacity. In the 21st century, space evolved from frontier exploration into a critical domain for global infrastructure and contested dominance. From 2024 – 2029, the DoD’s average proposed space budget has increased 82% from 2018 – 2023 averages. Governments from militarily competitive and adversarial countries continue to make significant investments in space and develop their capabilities, which we believe makes our unique mission solutions a crucial resource for the United States’ national defense strategy. Space is the critical backbone of national security communications, intelligence gathering, and support for terrestrial military operations. As one of the only U.S.-based commercial companies currently equipped to provide reliable access to launch, transit, and operations in space, we are leading the way in end-to-end services for the rapidly expanding defense, space exploration, and commercial space markets. Our products are designed to address our customers’ space and defense technology needs. Within Launch, we provide satellite customers with reliable, regular, and rapid access to space. Including its inaugural launch in 2021, Alpha has conducted six launches and has more than 30 planned launches under contract as of March 2025. The successful FLTA002 mission using Alpha made us the first U.S. company to achieve orbit on its second attempt. Our leading launch offerings are tailored to support the demands of our customers in the national security space. The VICTUS NOX mission using Alpha set a new responsive launch record for the U.S. Space Force (“Space Force”), with a turnaround time from notification to launch in approximately 24 hours, shattering the previous industry record of 21 days. The mission established a responsive launch defense capability that previously did not exist, which provides critical warfighting advantages to the United States. As a result of the success of VICTUS NOX, we have won additional responsive launch contracts for Alpha, including the VICTUS SOL and VICTUS HAZE missions. Alpha is an attractive platform for providing hypersonic flight test capabilities to the DoD and other federal agencies. Alpha is contracted to be utilized for MACH-TB, the DoD’s Multi-Service Advanced Capability Hypersonics Test Bed, to carry and deploy payloads into hypersonic trajectories, a crucial testing step for national security customers in the development of next generation weapon systems. Our Alpha platform allows us to provide cost effective hypersonic test capabilities, making us a partner of choice for defense companies looking to advance in the arena of hypersonics. The Eclipse rocket is a next-generation vehicle designed to fill a gap in the current launch market. Building on the scalable technological foundation of our Alpha launch vehicle, we are developing Eclipse in partnership with Northrop Grumman to be reusable and deliver upwards of 16 times the mass to orbit compared to Alpha. Eclipse leverages key technologies and expertise from Alpha, including a carbon composite structure and patented tap-off cycle engine technology. Additionally, Alpha laid the foundation for our production systems and test stands that are being used for rapid production of Eclipse. These design features and foundation enable enhanced performance, flexible launch schedules, and competitive pricing. To complement our Launch platform, we offer customizable Spacecraft that are versatile and launch vehicle agnostic: our proven Blue Ghost Lander and our multi mission orbital spacecraft line, Elytra, which is being built using the Blue Ghost technological framework. This pair of spacecraft product lines leverages common technologies including flight software, thrusters, batteries, avionics, and composite structures. Our spacecraft are flexible and can be launched individually or together to enable lander and on-orbit missions. --- On March 2, 2025, we became the first private company to successfully land and operate on the Moon with Blue Ghost Mission 1. The achievement marked the first fully successful U.S. lunar surface landing since the Apollo era over 50 years ago. Historically, only five countries—the United States, China, Russia, Japan, and India—have achieved the feat of a lunar soft-landing, putting Firefly’s capability in the realm of global superpowers. Blue Ghost Mission 1 carried 10 NASA payloads to the Moon for a total contract value of $102.1 million and completed all NASA missions for 14 days on the surface and five hours into the lunar night, while successfully meeting mission expectations. The success of our Blue Ghost lander delivered valuable data and positions us to push forward rapidly with additional lunar missions, as well as future interplanetary expeditions. During Blue Ghost Mission 1, we also proved our common Elytra spacecraft technology by operating through LEO, MEO, GEO, and Cislunar space prior to landing. Elytra will directly support Blue Ghost Mission 2 in 2026, providing data relay services from lunar orbit. Elytra is also contracted to conduct an on-orbit mission that supports the National Reconnaissance Office (“NRO”), and is onboarded to perform technology missions to support the Proliferated Warfighter Space Architecture of Tracking and Transport layer constellations for the Space Development Agency (“SDA”). Elytra has also been placed on contract for a Space Maneuver Vehicle to support the DoD’s DIU with high delta-v to perform hundreds of RPO maneuvers to perform Space Domain Awareness to deter rival space threats. Firefly’s state-of-the-art facilities support our Launch and Spacecraft product lines. Our research and development, iterative testing, and scalable manufacturing processes are vertically integrated and streamlined. Our corporate headquarters, the Rocket Ranch, and the Hive are located just north of Austin, Texas. The Rocket Ranch, our 200-acre,state-of-the-art manufacturing and testing facility, is strategically located within 25 miles of our Austin facilities. The Rocket Ranch has approximately 200,000 square feet of production capacity, six test stands, and advanced manufacturing equipment which leverages automation through robotics. The Hive houses our spacecraft, software, and avionics teams, in addition to a state-of-the-art clean room and a mission control room that supports launch, land, and orbit missions. We perform assembly and testing in-house and are co-locatedwith design and manufacturing, enabling fast and high-quality development cycles and efficient use of working capital. Our full suite of manufacturing capabilities is supplemented by four launch sites, which will continue to enhance flexibility and responsiveness for our missions. We can arrange ongoing launch rockets from the Vandenberg Space Force Base launch site in California. Additional launch sites are under construction at Virginia’s Mid-Atlantic Regional Spaceport on Wallops Island and the Esrange Space Center in Sweden, and future launch pad capacity will be unlocked from expansion at Cape Canaveral SFS in Florida. Our significant scale and unique blueprint are strategically planned to support our increasing launch cadence as we grow. Our principal executive offices are located in Cedar Park, TX.
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