How successful is Alpha?

Alpha's early flights had partial successes and failures, but later flights have demonstrated improved reliability. The vehicle is now operational with regular customers.

Firefly and Northrop are targeting late 2020s for MLV first flight. The Antares 330 first-stage hardware is the proving ground.

Is Blue Ghost human-rated?

No. Blue Ghost is a robotic lunar lander designed to deliver up to 150 kg of payload to the lunar surface under NASA's CLPS program.

Firefly Aerospace: Alpha, Blue Ghost, and the Path to MLV

Firefly is a multi-product space company: a small launch rocket called Alpha, a lunar lander called Blue Ghost, an Antares replacement upper stage, and a brand-new medium launcher called MLV being co-developed with Northrop Grumman. Few companies in the space industry hold this many simultaneous active programs.

Alpha: small launch

Alpha is a 95-foot-tall two-stage rocket capable of putting 1,030 kg in low Earth orbit. It uses Reaver 1 engines on the first stage and Lightning 1 on the second. After early flight challenges, recent Alpha missions have demonstrated improved reliability.

Blue Ghost: NASA's commercial lunar lander

Blue Ghost successfully landed on the Moon in March 2025 — Firefly's first lunar mission and the first fully successful private lunar landing. It carried 10 NASA payloads under the Commercial Lunar Payload Services program, including a regolith sampler and a radiation tolerance experiment.

Founded: 2014 (re-formed 2017)
HQ: Cedar Park, Texas
First Alpha launch: September 2021
Blue Ghost Mission 1: Successful lunar landing March 2025
Antares 330 first stage: Co-developed with Northrop Grumman
MLV target payload: ~16,000 kg to LEO

Antares 330 and MLV partnership

After Russia's invasion of Ukraine cut off the RD-181 engines used on Antares, Northrop Grumman partnered with Firefly to build a new first stage powered by Firefly's Miranda engines. That first stage will fly Antares 330 to ISS resupply and serves as the basis for MLV — a medium-lift vehicle competing with Falcon 9 and Vulcan in the late 2020s.

Elytra and orbital tugs

Firefly's Elytra is an orbital transfer vehicle for last-mile delivery — picking up satellites from a rideshare drop-off orbit and pushing them to their operational orbit. It is tightly integrated with Alpha but designed to fly on any launcher.