Firefly increases vehicle production even as launches lag
WASHINGTON — Firefly Aerospace says it is seeing strong interest in its launch vehicles and is ramping up production, but those efforts have yet to translate into an increased launch rate.
Firefly executives said in an Aug. 11 earnings call that production of its Alpha launch vehicle is at an “all-time high” as development continues of its larger Eclipse vehicle to meet what they said is strong commercial and government interest in space access.
“I can’t stress enough that the demand for launch capacity is amplified right now. We’ve never seen launch capacity so constrained,” Jason Kim, chief executive of Firefly, said during the call. “That not only helps the demand for Alpha, but also for Eclipse.”
He said the company is working to increase production of Alpha, its small launch vehicle capable of placing up to one ton into low Earth orbit. “We have so much hardware on the floor. The production is at an all-time high, so that gives us really, really high confidence that we’re going to continue to pump out Alphas at rate.”
Actual launches, though, lag production. Alpha has launched only seven times, dating to September 2021. Its most recent launch was in March, a return-to-flight mission after a failure on an April 2025 launch.
The company has been working on an upgraded version of Alpha, Block 2, that stretches both stages and improves several vehicle subsystems. In a May earnings call, Kim said that the next Alpha launch, Flight 8, would be the first Block 2 launch and was scheduled for “late this summer.”
In this earnings call, though, Kim said the Flight 8 launch is now expected in the fourth quarter. He said the company was planning one more launch after Flight 8 this year, versus the two he projected in May.
He was also vague about launch plans for Alpha in 2027. “A majority of our manifest for 2027 has already been sold out,” he said, but declined to say how many missions were on its manifest for the year. “We’re not going to talk about guidance for 2027,” he said when asked about the company’s projected launch cadence for next year.
That slow pace of launches has, at a minimum, delayed some business. Firefly announced in October 2024 that it won a launch contract from True Anomaly for three responsive launch missions using Alpha, starting with the Victus Haze mission for the Space Force. However, True Anomaly’s Jackal spacecraft that it built for Victus Haze instead launched in May on a SpaceX rideshare mission.
Kim said that the launch contract with True Anomaly remains in place after the Space Force told True Anomaly to launch Jackal on another vehicle for Victus Haze. The Alpha launch intended for that mission is “saved for a later date per the Space Force direction,” he said.
Firefly also announced Aug. 11 that Lockheed Martin extended an existing contract with the company for Alpha launches. The original contract, announced in June 2024, included 15 Alpha launches and options for up to 10 more through 2029. The extension allows the contract to run through 2031 but does not increase the number of launches beyond the previous maximum of 25.
Firefly is also continuing work on Eclipse, the medium-class vehicle the company is jointly developing with Northrop Grumman. “We’re just heads down right now on our Eclipse program,” Kim said, including qualification of the Miranda engine for the first stage. He noted Firefly recently completed a mission-duty-cycle test of the engine, firing it for 226 seconds.
Firefly is working on other hardware for the vehicle as well, he said. However, he offered few specifics about when Eclipse will make its debut, saying only that the launch is planned for no earlier than 2027.
Eclipse, he said, “is going to unlock a lot of launch capacity in the future,” but noted that Northrop will be responsible for marketing the vehicle for “government-facing work,” including on-ramping the rocket onto the Space Force’s National Security Space Launch contract.
“We’re just working toward our first launch, showing the capability because, at the end of the day, what matters most is delivering the payload to the mission orbit that we sign up for, and that’s what we’re focused on,” he said.
Reporting from SpaceNews contributed to this story.
