Updated at 8:25 p.m. Eastern Time with a post-launch statement.
TOKYO — Firefly Aerospace has launched eight cubesats into orbit in a mission funded by NASA, the first flight of the company’s Alpha rocket since an upper stage failure more than six months ago.
The Alpha rocket lifted off at 12:04 a.m. Eastern Time on July 4 from the foggy Vandenberg Space Force Base in California. A launch attempt on July 2 was canceled after a ground-based equipment problem halted the countdown just before the rocket’s first-stage engines were due to ignite.
The rocket began deploying its payload of eight cubesats about 35 minutes after the upper stage shut down, a process expected to take about 11 minutes, according to a Firefly timeline. The orbit was a low-Earth orbit, but Firefly did not disclose the specific target orbit for the mission before launch.
“After the expected deployment, NASA’s CubeSat teams are now awaiting acquisition of the signal,” the company said. Posted on social media three hours after launch, but neither NASA nor the payload owners commented on the status of their cubesats in the first hours after launch. The launch webcast confirmed the deployment of seven of the eight cubesats.
The mission, called Educational Launch of Nanosatellites (ELaNa 43) by NASA, carried four satellites developed by universities: the University of Arizona’s CatSat, the University of Kansas’ KUbeSat-1, the University of Maine’s MESAT-1 and the University of Washington’s SOC-I. NASA’s Johnson Space Center provided the R5-S4 and R5-S2-2.0 satellites, while Ames Research Center built the TechEdSat-11 cubesat. The eighth cubesat, Serenity, came from the nonprofit Teachers In Space.
NASA awarded Firefly a contract for the launch 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 VCLS launch in February 2022 failed to reach orbit when the upper stage of its Rocket 3.3 failed. Relativity had planned to use its Terran 1 rocket for its VCLS mission, but the company announced in April 2023 that it was retiring the vehicle after a single launch that failed to reach orbit so it could focus on its larger Terran R vehicle.
The launch was Alpha’s fifth overall, and the first since a December 2023 launch in which its payload, a Lockheed Martin technology demonstration satellite, was stranded in low Earth orbit when its upper stage failed during a second burn. The company later blamed the failure on a software glitch. Firefly said it relit a second stage during that mission and performed a “nominal plane change” after deploying the cubesats.
“The Firefly team did a fantastic job,” Firefly Aerospace CEO Bill Weber said in a statement after the launch.
Firefly has not yet announced a date for the next Firefly launch, but said ahead of this launch that it planned to conduct as many as four Alpha launches this year and six in 2025. The customer for the next launch is expected to be Lockheed Martin, which on June 5 announced 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 “special commercial mission” on the next Alpha, followed by a responsive space demonstration mission for the National Reconnaissance Office later this year on another Alpha, using Firefly’s Elytra tug.
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