Firefly Aerospace stock

Firefly Aerospace profile

By Jonathan Teplitsky · reviewed against primary sources · updated August 11, 2026.

Firefly Aerospace, based in Texas, is a launch and lunar-lander company that combines a commercial rocket business with NASA-funded Moon landings and newer in-space servicing work for the Space Force. In August 2025, it priced the largest US space and defense IPO on record.

What Firefly Aerospace does

Firefly Aerospace sells three separate space capabilities. The Alpha rocket carries small satellites to low Earth orbit for roughly $15 million a launch. The Blue Ghost lander delivers NASA and commercial payloads to the lunar surface under NASA's Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) program. The Elytra line of orbital vehicles handles the jobs once a payload is already in orbit: delivery, imaging, communications relay, and satellite deorbiting. Firefly is based in Cedar Park, Texas. It was founded in 2017 and is backed by private-equity firm AE Industrial Partners. Each business runs on its own sales cycle. Launch is priced per mission. Lunar delivery is milestone-funded government work. Elytra is the newest line, and it is still building its first paying government contracts.

The product lines that define the company for research purposes:

Alpha launch vehicle
Blue Ghost lunar lander
Elytra Dawn / Dusk / Dark orbital vehicles

This profile is qualitative by design. It carries no share price, no price target, no valuation multiple, and no rating — those change faster than any page can honestly track, and the filings linked below are the authoritative source for them.

Firefly Aerospace drone lineup

The current public product record does not identify a complete aircraft lineup.

No complete-aircraft offering is catalogued for this company; it is tracked here as an unmanned-systems enabler.

Statuses are editorial classifications from the company’s current public catalog: active means currently presented for sale, delivery, or program work; development means publicly disclosed but not a mature production offering; legacy means retained for historical or installed-fleet coverage.

Recent contracts & awards

A dated log of the specific contracts, orders, funding, and deployments reported for Firefly Aerospace, each tied to its primary source. This is a record of what was announced — a "selection", "award", or "partnership" is not the same as obligated money, so read each source before treating a figure as revenue. No figure appears here unless a source reported it.

PartnershipAug 19, 2026
Onboards Zeno Power radioisotope heater for a Blue Ghost lunar-night survival demonstration
Firefly agreed to fly a <a href="https://www.zenopower.com/">Zeno Power</a> radioisotope heating unit on an upcoming Blue Ghost mission to test whether radioisotope-based heat can keep lander systems running through the 14-day lunar night, after the lander's solar-powered CLPS science work is complete. Surviving the lunar night is the main obstacle to a lander operating for more than a single lunar day, so a working radioisotope option would extend what future Blue Ghost missions can do without changing the core spacecraft design.
Firefly Aerospace — Onboards Zeno Power for lunar-night survival demonstration
ContractAug 13, 2026
Awarded Defense Innovation Unit contract to design an Elytra deorbit system
The Department of War's <a href="https://www.diu.mil/">Defense Innovation Unit</a> and the <a href="https://www.sda.mil/">Space Development Agency</a> awarded Firefly a contract to complete a preliminary design review for an Elytra-based satellite deorbit service. The system is designed to fly an Elytra vehicle to a target satellite, perform rendezvous and proximity operations, survey it, and then complete the deorbit. No dollar value was disclosed, and a design-review award funds engineering work, not a built and flown deorbit mission.
Firefly Aerospace — Elytra deorbit system contract for Defense Innovation Unit
PartnershipAug 11, 2026
Firefly Aerospace extends multi-launch agreement with Lockheed Martin through 2031
Firefly Aerospace announced a two-year extension of its multi-launch agreement with existing customer Lockheed Martin, covering up to 25 upgraded Alpha Block II launches through 2031. Firefly's own announcement discloses no dollar value for the 1,000 kg payload class services, so researchers should verify primary award notices before treating the agreement as obligated funding. Separately, Firefly Aerospace is collaborating with Seagate Space and Lockheed Martin on Gateway offshore launch concepts, but this work is an early-stage concept and is not a signed program.
Firefly Aerospace — Lockheed Martin multi-launch agreement extension
EarningsAug 11, 2026
Firefly Aerospace reports $117.7 million in second-quarter 2026 revenue
On August 11, 2026, Firefly Aerospace reported second-quarter 2026 revenue of $117.7 million for the quarter ended June 30, 2026, which Firefly described as a record up 659% year-over-year. CEO Jason Kim said Firefly secured more than a half-dozen contract wins across rocket, spacecraft, and software programs, and added two Moon missions to the manifest. Because these figures are company-reported, researchers should check Firefly's own SEC filings (Form 10-Q) for the full financial statements, including margins, cash, and backlog, behind the headline revenue number.
Firefly Aerospace — Q2 2026 financial results
IPOAug 7, 2025$1B raised
Prices the largest US space and defense IPO on record
Firefly priced an upsized IPO of 19,296,000 shares at $45.00 each, raising roughly $1 billion in gross proceeds. The stock closed its first Nasdaq trading day up more than 34% at $60.35, valuing Firefly at approximately $8.5 billion. AE Industrial Partners remained the largest shareholder after the offering.
CNBC — Firefly Aerospace IPO debut

Where Firefly Aerospace sits in the value chain

Firefly Aerospace is a pure-play: unmanned systems are the business rather than one line inside it, so the P&L moves with drone demand and has little else to cushion a slow procurement year.

Its disclosed activity spans aerial drones. That placement is the single most useful thing to fix in your head before reading any coverage, because the same headline means different things at different layers: a large platform award is transformative for a pure-play, material but diluted for a diversified contractor, and only indirectly relevant to a component supplier whose exposure arrives later as build-rate demand. Retail coverage routinely applies one story to all three layers at once. For the layer-by-layer comparison across the sector, see the drone stocks research shortlist and the list of publicly traded drone companies.

Firefly's main competitors

Firefly competes in two markets that rarely overlap in a single rival. In small launch, it competes with Rocket Lab and, at the margins, larger providers such as SpaceX's rideshare missions. In lunar delivery, its closest comparison is Intuitive Machines, the other CLPS lander vendor with an actual Moon touchdown on its record. Investors often lump the two together as one "commercial Moon landing" category. They are not interchangeable, and each company's contract terms and landing record should be checked on its own. The newer Elytra orbital-services line answers to a different competitive set again, closer to in-space servicing and space-domain-awareness vendors than to either the launch or lander businesses. That is part of why Firefly reports Elytra as a distinct line rather than folding it into the other two.

Why three business lines complicate a single valuation

A company selling three products on three different sales cycles is hard to value with one multiple. Alpha behaves like a manufacturing and operations business. Its revenue tracks flights actually flown. Blue Ghost behaves like a government milestone contract instead. Its revenue recognizes against contract milestones set by NASA, not by Firefly. Elytra is the newest and least proven of the three, still moving from design-review contracts toward funded production work. Reading Firefly's headline revenue growth without separating which line drove it is a mistake. A strong lunar-milestone quarter can get credited to the launch business by accident, even when Alpha's own flight cadence has not changed at all.

Failure mode: a launch anomaly on Alpha

Firefly's Alpha rocket has had both successful and unsuccessful flights since its debut. That mixed record is typical for a small-launch vehicle this early in its flight history. A repeat anomaly would still hurt more here than at a company with a longer flight-proven record. Alpha's $15 million-a-launch pricing depends on flying often enough to spread fixed costs across many missions. A launch failure usually triggers a multi-month return-to-flight investigation, and that stalls the whole manifest behind it. There is an inversion case worth naming, though. The lunar-lander and Elytra businesses do not depend on Alpha flying at all, because Blue Ghost and Elytra vehicles have flown to orbit on other providers' rockets when needed. An Alpha-specific setback is not automatically a company-wide one.

What to watch

The signals worth tracking are structural, not price-based — they tell you whether the business is changing shape, which is what eventually shows up in the numbers.

Whether launch-services revenue (Alpha) or government lunar and orbital-services revenue (Blue Ghost, Elytra) is growing faster, since the two carry very different margin and contract-renewal profiles.
Alpha's flight cadence and success rate, because a small-launch business only becomes a repeatable revenue line once it flies on a predictable schedule rather than as isolated missions.
Backlog composition in Firefly's own filings: a lunar-lander contract like the reported $176.7 million Blue Ghost Mission 4 award is milestone-based, so backlog growth does not convert to revenue on a fixed schedule the way a manufacturing order would.
How much of the Elytra pipeline turns into signed Space Force or Defense Innovation Unit task orders rather than preliminary design studies, since a design-review contract is a much smaller commitment than a production award.

How to research Firefly Aerospace

Every question below has one authoritative source, and using the wrong source is how most retail research goes wrong.

Research question	Where the answer lives	What to look for
How much of this is really drones?	Segment tables in the annual filing	Whether unmanned systems are reported as their own segment or buried inside a larger one.
Is the revenue repeatable?	Revenue-recognition policy and backlog discussion	Recurring sustainment, services, or subscription language versus one-time hardware sales.
Is a win real money?	Official DoD contract announcements	Contract type, awarding command, and whether the amount announced is obligated or a ceiling.
Can the balance sheet fund the plan?	Liquidity discussion and share-count disclosure	Dilution history and cash runway relative to the manufacturing scale-up being promised.

Firefly's own investor relations site carries quarterly results and SEC filings. Check a launch-cadence or backlog claim in trade coverage against the filed numbers before it goes into a thesis.
For the IPO terms and float, the underlying S-1 and subsequent filings on SEC EDGAR are the primary record. A news article's valuation figure is a market snapshot from the day it was written, not a fixed number.
Elytra task orders route through the Defense Innovation Unit and the Space Force's Space Systems Command. A "contract to design" announcement, a preliminary design review, is not the same commitment as a contract to build and fly hardware, and the two should not be read as equivalent.
NASA's own Commercial Lunar Payload Services program page lists which CLPS task orders have actually been awarded to Firefly, which is the authoritative source for Blue Ghost mission counts rather than a mission-by-mission press release count.

One failure mode is worth naming explicitly: a company announcement describing a "selection", "award", or "partnership" is not the same as obligated money, and the two are easy to conflate because they use the same vocabulary. Check the filing before treating either as revenue. Our full approach is documented on the methodology page.

Firefly Aerospace FAQ

What does Firefly Aerospace do?

Firefly Aerospace sells three separate space capabilities.

Is Firefly Aerospace publicly traded?

Firefly Aerospace trades as FLY on NASDAQ. Listing status is not a quality signal, and nothing here is a recommendation to buy or sell it.

What should investors watch with Firefly Aerospace?

Whether launch-services revenue (Alpha) or government lunar and orbital-services revenue (Blue Ghost, Elytra) is growing faster, since the two carry very different margin and contract-renewal profiles.

Where can I research Firefly Aerospace directly?

Go to the primary sources: Firefly Aerospace (official site), Firefly Aerospace investor relations, Firefly Aerospace SEC filings. Avoid aggregator summaries when the filing itself is available.

How is Firefly Aerospace different from Rocket Lab?

Firefly and Rocket Lab both fly small launch vehicles, but Firefly is also a NASA-funded lunar-lander operator through Blue Ghost, a business Rocket Lab does not run. Compare the two on the specific line of business in question rather than as interchangeable small-launch peers.

Has Firefly Aerospace landed on the Moon?

Yes. Firefly's Blue Ghost Mission 1 completed a soft landing under NASA's Commercial Lunar Payload Services program and operated science payloads on the surface, which Firefly and NASA have both documented. Check NASA's CLPS program page for the mission record rather than a secondary summary.

What would change the read on Firefly's growth story?

A sustained gap between Alpha's announced flight manifest and its actual flights, or an Elytra pipeline that stays stuck at preliminary-design contracts instead of converting to funded production work, would both undercut the growth case built into its post-IPO valuation.