Under tight deadlines from the Space Force, Firefly gears up for its next launch

We’re coming up on one year since we’ve last seen Firefly launch its Alpha rocket from Vandenberg Space Force Base. That wait will soon be over as the company announced it’s currently waiting on word from the US Space Force for its third launch, sometime within the next six months.

Firefly’s fast past launch attempt

Firefly Aerospace and Millennium Space have been given a noticed to remain on stand-by for the next six months for orders from the Space Force. This is part of a new project the two are under contract for called Victus Nox that plans to get a satellite from its manufacture into orbit in a matter of days.

At a moment’s notice, Millennium is prepared to transport the payload to Firefly’s launch site at Vandenberg, California, fuel it, and mate it with Alpha’s payload adaptor. All of this is expected to take only 60 hours rather than weeks or months.

Then, the Space Force will send Firefly a launch notice where it will have 24 hours to run simulations, encapsulate the payload in Alpha’s fairings, and be ready to launch when the first opportunity arises.

While Victus Nox is pitched as a short turnaround, Firefly and Millennium have been preparing for these events for several months. Both companies have even performed dress rehearsals for everything. However, the point of Victus Nox was to prove this short turnaround launch is possible, so both companies developed procedures to perform such tasks in quick order.

This will be Firefly’s third launch of its alpha rocket, the first two being semi-successful demonstrations that the company can indeed launch a rocket and make it to space. While both previous launches have been dubbed successes in the rocket’s development, neither have been full on successes.

Firefly’s first launch two years ago failed about two and a half minutes after liftoff. Then Alpha’s second mission back in October 2022, saw it reach orbit, but not to its intended orbit. Because the payloads on that second mission were delivered too low, most of them reentered Earth’s atmosphere within a week.

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Firefly’s competition has seemingly disappear

While Firefly still works to have its first full successful mission, some of its competitors have changed directions to focus on a new launch market.

Just a few years ago the small satellite launch market was flooded with potential hopefuls that were just preparing to launch their first missions. After several failed and successful launch attempts, a lot of them have pivoted to build larger rockets to meet the medium to heavy launch shortage many analyst have stated exist.

Both Astra and Relativity have full on abandoned their smallsat launchers for larger rockets in hope they have enough cash to get them operational and competing with SpaceX. Rocket Lab, however, is still building and selling its Electron rocket while developing its partially reusable Neutron rocket.

If Rocket Lab’s increased launch output and the continued need for SpaceX’s massive ride share missions are anything to go on. Then it looks like the smallsat market is still a viable contender for attention. However, it looks like other than a select few, the launch provider community has their eyes set on dethroning SpaceX as the medium-high launch king.