Austin, Texas. Home of the potentially-coming-back longhorns, Willie Nelson, and your favorite source for entrepreneurial and business news. You can now add Space-X competitor to that list. Firefly Aerospace, a Cedar Park based rocket company is joining forces with York Space Systems to give Elon a run for his money.
Firefly Aerospace (no Nathan Fillion affiliation) is having one hell of a comeback. In April of 2017, the aerospace company was grounded by a bankruptcy. The company was founded back in 2014 under a different name.
They had test fired their first rocket within a year, had secured a contract with NASA and raised a significant amount of funding — things seemed to be looking up. However, they lost their momentum after a backer dropped out. The turbulence increased from there and the company furloughed most of its staff and filed Chapter 7 bankruptcy shortly thereafter. That was April of 2017.
Now in the fall of 2018, Firefly has found quite the whirl-wind of re-ignition. During South By Southwest, a tech/music/film festival that Austinites fondly refer to as SXSW, Firefly test-fired a rocket. THEY LAUNCHED A ROCKET INTO THE SKY JUST OUTSIDE OF AUSTIN.
A few months later, Firefly joined forces with Surrey Satellite Technology Ltd. to accomplish six launches between 2020 and 2022.
Just two weeks ago, Firefly announced that they would be teaming up with York Space Systems from Denver to launch York’s S-CLASS satellites.
In a press release, York’s CEO said, “Our commercial and government customers emphasize the need for integrated solutions that facilitate rapid deployment of spacecraft.” He went onto say, “this partnership with Firefly will give our customers another fantastic launch service option for rapid access to space.”
In their own press release, Firefly’s VP of Business Development, Les Kovacs, said, “Alpha’s industry leading small satellite launch vehicle performance will enable Firefly to provide York’s expanding customer base pre-configured launch solutions to greatly reduce historically long launch campaign timelines.”
It’ll be fun to watch Firefly’s re-ascent into orbit. With rockets and satellites, there will definitely be something to keep your eyes on.
Kiri Isaac is the Web Producer and a Staff Writer at The American Genius and studied communications at Texas A&M. She is fluent in sarcasm and movie quotes and her love language is tacos.
