Every Cosmic Herald story on Firefly Aerospace — missions, launches, discoveries, and the business of space, newest first.
NASA on-ramped four companies — All Points Logistics, Blue Origin, Firefly Aerospace, and L3Harris — to a $100 million payload processing contract that expands where commercial providers can prep spacecraft for launch.
Read the story →Firefly Aerospace's Q2 10-Q and August 11 investor call confirm the Alpha Block 2 debut has slipped to Q4 2026, after an in-flight booster rupture and a September 2025 test-stand explosion forced a heavier redesign.
A spent Falcon 9 upper stage from January 2025's Blue Ghost/Hakuto-R launch slammed into the Moon's far side near Einstein crater on August 5, 2026, and ESO's VLT caught sodium and lithium flashing in the debris plume.
Firefly Aerospace will build the aeroshell for NASA's SkyFall mission, which plans to release three Ingenuity-derived helicopters mid-air over Mars in 2028 without ever landing a platform.
NASA awarded four CLPS task orders worth roughly $590M to Astrobotic, Firefly and Intuitive Machines to land four robotic missions on the Moon in late 2028, each carrying three payloads including the SCALPSS plume-imaging cameras.
NASA stopped building its own small Moon landers and started buying rides instead. The result is a wave of commercial spacecraft from Intuitive Machines, Firefly, and others aiming for the lunar surface in 2026 — a bumpy, fast-moving experiment in outsourcing exploration.
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