Firefly Aerospace's Alpha second stage undergoes integrated testing on the 100-foot Firefly vertical... [+] test stand. It's been a steep climb to stability for Firefly Aerospace, but big results are ready for launch. The newspace startup announced Friday (Feb. 22) it will undertake a $52 million expansion, including a launch site at Cape Canaveral Spaceport in Florida, as it prepares for its first launch in Q4 of this year. A mass production facility at nearby Exploration Park will allow Firefly to build 24 Alpha vehicles every year, both for small satellites and also to join the growing lunar space market that NASA is charging into. Not a bad turnaround considering that a predecessor company, Firefly Space Systems, filed for bankruptcy protection just three years ago, after Brexit forced a major European investor out of the nascent firm. But a spokesperson portrays this turnaround not as a miraculous development, but a carefully executed and planned expansion that is chugging along on schedule. "We've been back in business for two and a half years, and it never felt like it was rising from the ashes," said Mark Watt, a company founder and director. "It was a natural progression for the business. It was very calculated [in terms of] the architecture and the technology." Firefly's headline vehicle is the Alpha, an expendable launch vehicle capable of sending a metric ton to low Earth orbit or 630 kilograms to the commonly used sun-synchronous orbit. Firefly is almost ready to send payloads to polar orbit using its launch facilities at Vandenberg Air Force Base in California. Canaveral opens the door to equatorial launches and interplanetary launches in 2021 – an important step for a company that desires moon missions. A more powerful launch vehicle called Beta is in the works as well. The senior executive of Firefly tries to straddle the fine line between innovation to reduce market costs, and proven technology to make customers comfortable. For example, Alpha structures and propellant tanks are built using carbon fiber composites to better contain supercooled liquid oxygen. The benefits are fewer cracks and leaks. But Watt said they are not doing something completely novel, like 3D printing an entire engine. A side benefit is Firefly could eventually license the intellectual property for this type of work, although that's not a current revenue stream, Watt said. "I think it's so easy for companies to fall in love with crazy, incredibly novel technologies," he added. "Our approach is [instead], let's look at what's here and see how to improve that." Firefly's second-stage Lightning engine undergoes testing. Firefly already has some reference customers in its backlog, including NASA for a lucrative commercial lunar payload services contract. Watt says that NASA is trending away from firms that offer single-launch services and instead, looking for companies like Firefly that can offer end-to-end solutions. That's why the Canaveral deal includes manufacturing facilities and other support services for launch. Space Florida has been trying to help local industry recover since the end of the space shuttle program in 2011, which threw highly trained personnel such as launch pad workers into unemployment. Things are different today. The SpaceX Falcon Heavy test launch of 2018 brought tourist crowds to the Space Coast not seen since the shuttle era. And more quietly, local suppliers and manufacturers are on the rise to support the influx of commercial companies such as SpaceX, Blue Origin and now, Firefly, said Dale Ketcham, the organization's vice-president of government and external affairs. "It's becoming less acute here," he said of the business downturn. "As we bring more capability to Florida, it makes it an increasingly likely – if people want to work in the space industry – to know this is where the work is." Ketcham has been participating in the aerospace industry for decades, including the era of traditional behemoths like Lockheed Martin and Boeing – which, to be sure, are still very much players in space activities. But what he finds interesting is the shift to the small-space ecosystem. Smaller companies mean that there will be more diverse sorts of activity, including the situation that Firefly recovered from, he said. "You are going to have bankruptcies, failures, startups, all the stuff that proliferates in the commercial market – in every commercial market in America. That's going to become more commonplace in the space marketplace," he said. "That's not a bad thing. That's evidence of a thriving market."
Firefly Aerospace is set for a significant expansion, just three years after its predecessor filed for bankruptcy protection following the loss of a big European investor. The new-space company confirmed it is investing $52m ahead of its first launch in Q4 2019. This includes a launch site at California’s Cape Canaveral Spaceport and a mass production facility at Exploration Park to build 24 Alpha vehicles annually. The latter will be for small satellites and potentially capitalising on the NASA-invigorated lunar space market. Firefly Aerospace said its turnaround is the consequence of carefully planning its architecture and technology.