Firefly Aerospace signs a $30M deal

Firefly Aerospace, a company of Ukrainian entrepreneur Max Polyakov, has signed a $30 million deal with small aerospace company Astra. Under the terms of the deal, Firefly Aerospace will transfer the rights to manufacture its Reaver rocket engines to Astra, as reported by The Verge, citing its own sources.

• According to an internal Firefly document viewed by The Verge, Firefly will send up to 50 of its Reaver engines to the customer in Alameda, California.
• A prototype of such an engine was sent to the customer for about $500,000 back in the spring of 2021. Since then, Astra engineers have been studied it in detail.
• The Firefly engines should help Astra achieve its publicly stated “500kg to 500km” goal. The company’s rocket — called Rocket — has already undergone test launches but still has not reached orbit. The latest iterations of this rocket used an in-house developed Astra engine called Delphin.
• The last attempt to launch the Astra rocket in August 2021 was unsuccessful after one of the five main engines failed a couple of seconds after liftoff.
• Firefly Aerospace carried out the first launch of its Alpha rocket in early September 2021. The rocket successfully launched from the launch pad; however, shortly after liftoff, it exploded due to the failure of one of the engines. Check out the article to read more about this launch.

AIN.UA reached out to Firefly Aerospace for comment, but at the time of writing, the company had not responded.