Updated 8:25 PM Eastern with post-launch statement.
TOKYO — Firefly Aerospace has placed eight cubesats into orbit as part of a NASA-funded mission on the first flight of the company’s Alpha rocket since an upper stage failure more than half a year ago.
The Alpha rocket lifted off from the foggy Vandenberg Space Force Base in California at 04:04 a.m. ET on July 4. The July 2 launch attempt was scrubbed after a problem with ground equipment halted the countdown just before the rocket’s first stage engines ignited.
The rocket began deploying its payload of eight cubesats about 35 minutes after the upper stage shut down, a process expected to take about 11 minutes according to a timeline provided by Firefly. The orbit was low, but Firefly did not disclose the mission’s specific target path before launch.
“Following the expected deployment, @NASA’s CubeSat teams are now waiting to receive a signal,” the company said posted on social media three hours after launch, but neither NASA nor the payload owners commented on the status of their cubesats in the first few hours after launch. The introductory webcast confirmed the deployment of seven of the eight cubesats.
NASA’s Educational Launch of Nanosatellites (ELaNa 43) mission carried four university-developed satellites: CatSat from the University of Arizona, KUbeSat-1 from the University of Kansas, MESAT-1 from the University of Maine, and SOC-I. from the University of Washington. NASA’s Johnson Space Center provided the R5-S4 and R5-S2-2.0 satellites, while the Ames Research Center built the TechEdSat-11 cubesat. The eighth cubesat, Serenity, came from the non-profit group Teachers In Space.
NASA awarded Firefly a launch contract through its Venture Class Launch Services (VCLS) Demo 2 program to support new small launch vehicles. Firefly won the contract for VCLS Demo 2 in 2020 along with Astra Space and Relativity Space. Astra’s February 2022 VCLS launch failed to reach orbit when its rocket’s 3.3 upper stage failed. Relativity had planned to use its Terran 1 rocket for its VCLS mission, but the company announced in April 2023 that it would retire the vehicle after a single launch that failed to reach orbit to focus on its larger Terran R vehicle.
The launch was Alpha’s fifth overall and the first since the December 2023 launch that stuck its payload, a Lockheed Martin technology demonstration satellite, in low orbit when the upper stage failed in a second burn. The company later blamed the incident on a software issue. On this mission, Firefly stated that it had completed the second stage flashover and “nominal aircraft change” after deploying the cubesats.
“The Firefly team knocked it out of the park,” said Bill Weber, chief executive officer of Firefly Aerospace, in a post-launch statement.
Firefly has not announced a date for Firefly’s next launch, but has said ahead of this launch that it plans to conduct up to four Alpha launches this year and up to six in 2025. The customer for the next launch is believed to be Lockheed Martin, which announced on June 5 a contract with Firefly for at least 15 and up to 25 Alpha launches by 2029.
In its post-launch statement, Firefly confirmed that Lockheed will launch a “dedicated commercial mission” on the next Alpha, followed later in the year by a sensitive space demonstration mission for the National Reconnaissance Office on the next Alpha using Firefly’s Elytra tug.
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