Updated at 8:25 PM Eastern with post launch statement.
TOKYO — Firefly Aerospace put eight pods into orbit on a NASA-funded mission on the first flight of the company’s Alpha rocket since an upper stage malfunction more than half a year ago.
The Alpha rocket lifted off from a foggy Vandenberg Space Force base in California at 12:04 a.m. on July 4th. An attempted launch on July 2 was scrapped after a ground equipment problem halted the countdown just before the rocket’s first-stage engines ignited.
The rocket began deploying its payload of eight canisters 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 a low Earth orbit, but Firefly did not reveal the target’s specific orbit for the mission before launch.
“Following the expected deployment, @NASA’s CubeSat teams are now awaiting signal acquisition,” the company posted on social media three hours after liftoff, but neither NASA nor the payload owners commented on the status of their pods in the first hours after liftoff. The webcast confirmed the placement of seven of the eight cubes.
The mission, named Educational Launch of Nanosatellites (ELaNa 43) by NASA, 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 Ames Research Center built the TechEdSat-11 pods. The eighth cube, Serenity, came from a 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 VCLS Demo 2 contract in 2020 along with Astra Space and Relativity Space. Astra’s February 2022 VCLS launch failed to reach orbit when its Rocket 3.3 upper stage malfunctioned. Relativity 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, so it could focus on its more great Terran R.
The launch was Alpha’s fifth overall, and the first since the December 2023 launch to stall its payload, a Lockheed Martin technology demonstration satellite, in a low orbit when the upper stage failed in a second burn . The company later blamed the incident on a software glitch. On this mission, Firefly said it completed a second-stage rebuild and “nominal aircraft modification” after deploying the pods.
“The Firefly team knocked it out of the park,” Bill Weber, chief executive officer of Firefly Aerospace, said in a statement after the launch.
Firefly has not announced a date for the next Firefly launch, but said before this launch that it planned to conduct up to four Alpha launches this year and up to six in 2025. The customer for the next launch is expected to be Lockheed Martin, the which announced on June 5 a contract with Firefly for at least 15 and up to 25 Alpha launches through 2029.
Firefly confirmed in its post-launch statement that Lockheed will launch a “dedicated commercial mission” on the next Alpha, followed by a responsible space demonstration mission for the National Reconnaissance Office later in the year on another Alpha. using Firefly’s Elytra pull.
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