Firefly Aerospace will use $112 million in funding from NASA to launch the Blue Ghost lander aboard a SpaceX rocket to the moon's surface later this year.
But CEO Bill Webber said the Texas-based company would go it alone and achieve a fully commercial moonshot mission with its own medium-sized rocket without funding from NASA. Look into the future and complete the missions.
“The commercial industry needs to operate its transportation,” Weber said in an interview with Yahoo Finance. “And the government will be leveraging its capabilities instead of being the driver of prime contracts. We're really at a tipping point. There's definitely enough demand on the commercial side.”
Weber's ambitions point to the rapid evolution of a new space economy, increasingly driven by commercial interests. Borrowing a playbook from SpaceX and its founder Elon Musk, companies like Firefly are moving faster, building bigger things and cutting costs in the process, allowing companies like tech startups to He's bringing his thinking to space exploration.
This push is expanding the scope of space companies beyond launch systems and satellites. The World Economic Forum predicts that the space economy will reach $1.8 trillion by 2035, growing at a rate of 9% annually. As demand for applications such as satellite data and communications grows, five industries, including supply chain, retail and consumer goods, are expected to generate more than 60% of that growth over the next decade.
“The lower cost of entry to get things off the ground really caused a change in the industry and brought in a lot of excited and ambitious people very quickly,” said Matt, managing director and partner at BCG. Martinez said.
Launch, landing, orbit
Commercial demand driven by increased access to space is accelerating Firefly's expansion plans.
Founded in 2017, the company bills itself as an end-to-end space transportation company, aiming to be involved in every step of the process required from satellite launch to deployment.
The company's mission to “Launch, Land, Orbit” is displayed on a banner atop a sprawling 200-acre rocket ranch located an hour outside Austin, Texas. Inside one complex, engineers are building the Firefly small rocket known as Alpha, and a second building is building the new medium-sized rocket (MLV), developed in partnership with Northrop Grumman (NOC). is dedicated to. Firefly has six of his test stands outdoors, where employees test rocket engines almost every day.
“What sets Firefly apart is how much of it is manufactured in-house,” said Brigette Oakes, vice president of engineering. “We have an integrated machine shop, composite fabrication, engine testing, stage testing, so we can build these rockets at essentially as fast a pace as our customers want.”
In 2023, the company launched a satellite into orbit 27 hours after receiving the order from the U.S. Space Force. This significantly reduced the previous response time of 21 days.
This ability to act quickly and reduce costs is expanding the boundaries of space exploration. Companies like SpaceX and Rocket Lab (RKLB) currently launch every 34 hours, and Earth is scheduled for 259 launches this year, according to the Space Foundation.
Firefly has only successfully launched three rockets into orbit, but it has doubled the size of its facility to automate much of its production in anticipation of expansion.
New automated fiber placement machinery installed last year allows the company to mass produce vehicle structures for the Alpha rocket in seven days and rocket structures for the MLV in 30 days. Oakes says this is nine times faster and seven times cheaper than the laser-guided process that engineers previously relied on.
commercialization of the moon
Until now, growth in the commercial space economy has been largely limited to launch vehicles and satellites, but NASA is turning to the private sector to push it further.
The agency's Commercial Lunar Payload Services program has set aside $2.6 billion for more than a dozen companies to develop low-cost transportation systems to bring the agency's research results to the lunar surface, along with payloads for commercial customers.
Firefly is scheduled to launch its Blue Ghost lunar lander aboard a SpaceX rocket later this year, following limited success by Intuitive Machines (LUNR) and Astrobotic, and the first private company to launch a lunar lander. This is the third attempt to reach the surface.
“What's happening now is that we're taking our Earthly business into space,” said NASA Administrator Bill Nelson. “We have a small start-up company that is providing landers for NASA experiments so that astronauts can explore the moon's south pole before they arrive there.”
Each Firefly landing mission is expected to cost approximately $100 million, a fraction of the $660 million that NASA paid for a similar landing mission in the 1960s, adjusted for inflation. It doesn't work.
The path to monetization
Blue Ghost's launch later this year will be the first of two Firefly missions supported by NASA. The second mission, scheduled to reach the moon's south pole in 2026, will be launched on MLV, allowing the company to move forward without SpaceX support.
Both will bring NASA experiments to the moon's surface, but the company is currently launching its own mission to the moon with a “100% commercial payload” in response to requests from customers who can't “ride” on the initial mission. Weber said the plan is to implement the following.
The company will not receive funding from NASA for its independent mission, but NASA could become a paying customer, Weber said.
Currently, Firefly derives more than 60% of its revenue from launch systems. The remaining 40% comes from its spacecraft business, including the Blue Ghost and the Elytra orbital vehicle. Weber said he expects the company's moon mission to be profitable by the end of this decade.
“If your only business is lunar exploration missions and landings, you're going to have a very difficult time as your revenue structure diversifies,” he said. “We have three different mechanisms by which we can serve our customers from the same engineering site, from the same manufacturing site, from the same supply chain, and because we can deliver all of that, we can accomplish a mission like this with minimal profit.”
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