Transcript
The Brief Interviewer (00:18.318)
Welcome everyone to a special episode of The Brief. The following interview with Michael Sheets of Firefly Aerospace was filmed live at our invitation-only Olivon Advisors Spring 2025 conference in Austin, Texas. Let’s get started. Michael, the space industry is fast evolving. Where is Firefly Aerospace based and how does it fit in the sector?
Michael Sheetz (00:43)
Firefly Aerospace is based right here in Austin, Texas. We’re a proudly operated company out of the Texas area. We have all of our manufacturing, testing, and assembly facilities here just north of Austin. What we really focus on is how we fit in the broader ecosystem of launch and spacecraft. So our main two products is what we build are rockets and we build spacecraft. Our two different rockets, we have an operational rocket Alpha and we have a developmental rocket called MLV serve satellites that are headed to low Earth orbit and beyond. Mainly these are a lot of national security focused missions that we’re serving and we’ve been serving for multiple years already. We’ve reached orbit, we’ve demonstrated a capability beyond just deploying satellites in orbit. The second piece of what we do here is we build spacecraft. Our first spacecraft that we operated in orbit was our Blue Ghost Lunar Lander, which reached the moon on March 2nd successfully. That was our major step into the spacecraft world, but we’re also building out our Electra vehicle spacecraft platform, which really will help us tap into a broader ecosystem of basically all of the orbits in between here and the moon, and offering a wide variety of capability, especially for our national security customers.
The Brief Interviewer (02:04)
What is Firefly’s greatest accomplishment so far?
Michael Sheetz (02:08)
Our greatest achievement happened on March 2nd when we successfully touched down on the surface of the moon, making us the first company in history to successfully land and operate a full lunar mission on the moon’s surface. That is not just an achievement for an American company, that’s an achievement of any company in the private sector globally. The only people who had ever achieved such a feat before were five different national superpowers, putting Firefly in rarefied air, and that was underneath a NASA contract that we performed from three and a half years from signing of the contract to landing on the surface of the moon, delivering critical NASA payloads to the moon for an $101.5 million contract.
The Brief Interviewer (02:51)
Are you going to go back to the moon?
Michael Sheetz (02:54)
As a matter of fact, we will be. already have one additional follow-up missions from NASA. We’re going be flying our Blue Ghost Moon missions on basically an annual cadence. So our next mission is set to launch next year. Each of these missions have increasing capability as well as ambition. So we’re trying to add capabilities as we go and build upon what was already a successful first mission.
The Brief Interviewer (03:19)
You mentioned rockets earlier. What stage of development is that side of the business at?
Michael Sheetz (03:24)
Well, that’s the beauty of what we have here at Firefly is we have both an operational orbital rocket that’s launched five times already and is about to do its sixth launch, as well as a larger rocket in development called MLV. These are vehicles that are complementary to a lot of different systems that you may have heard of already in this space ecosystem. Folks like SpaceX, Blue Origin, ULA, we offer a complementary service to what they do. Instead of bulk goods delivery into orbit, we’re doing specific smaller payloads into targeted orbits, primarily for defense customers.
The Brief Interviewer (04:01)
Where do you build your rockets and spacecraft?
Michael Sheetz (04:05)
So we have two main areas where we put together all of our rockets and spacecraft. One’s in Cedar Park in Texas where we build and assemble our spacecraft and we have clean rooms as well as our mission control there at facility we call the Hive. We also have a second facility which is 200 acres, just 30 minute drive north of there in Briggs, Texas where we have over 200,000 square feet of manufacturing space for our engines as well as our structures and other parts of our compound around that facility we have six different engine test stands that allows us to have a really tight iteration loop in our innovation and make sure that we’re progressing really rapidly from one goal to the next as we’re developing these new technologies. So it’s not just an aspirational business who has longer term goals of tapping into larger markets with our MLV rocket but it’s an operational business that’s already flying and has a production lineup of Alpha rockets in flow.
The Brief Interviewer (05:07)
What’s next for Firefly in 2025?
Michael Sheetz (05:10)
Next up for us is really about scaling our alpha launch business. We want to take alpha instead of launching one or two times a year, be launching four, eight, 12, and maybe up to 24 times a year. That’s the demand that we see from the marketplace. So what we’re focused on on the alpha side of the business, especially in 2025, is expanding and scaling that production and launch rate together. Then the second piece of it is moving along the development of our MLV vehicle, as well as finishing a lot of the work that we’ve already begun for our blue Ghost Mission 2.
The Brief Interviewer (05:045)
Thank you for joining us here at The Brief by Olivon Advisors. For more information on our presenters, please visit olivonadvisors.com/companies. Want to join our mailing list? You can by signing up at olivanadvisors.com. We look forward to seeing you on the next episode of The Brief.
