Firefly Aerospace's next Alpha rocket explodes during testing

The booster (first) stage for Firefly Aerospace's next Alpha rocket was destroyed Monday Sept. 29 in a fiery accident on the company's vertical test stand in Central Texas. 

Engineers were testing the rocket before shipment to Vandenberg Space Force Base, California, to prepare for launch later this year with a small commercial satellite for Lockheed Martin. Activities at the vertical test stand in Briggs, Texas, include propellant loading and test-firings of the booster's four kerosene-fueled engines. The rocket was undergoing one of these test-firings on Monday when the accident occurred. 

Firefly released a statement saying the rocket "experienced an event that resulted in a loss of the stage." The company confirmed all personnel were safe and said ground teams followed "proper safety protocols."  They concluded with saying, "We will share more information on the path forward at a later date." 

It seemed to me that this story was more recently, but on Sept. 15, Firefly's investigation of losing the booster on their previous launch, Message in a Booster, was resolved enabling them to get closer to launching this mission for Lockheed Martin.  This mission was to be the Alpha's return to flight mission.  

Still image from a security camera video of a nearby business shows the explosion of Firefly's Alpha rocket on the test stand in Briggs, Texas. Credit: Harold's Auto Parts

Firefly's facility in Briggs is roughly 40 miles north of Austin.

The booster destroyed Monday was slated to fly on the seventh launch of Firefly's Alpha rocket, an expendable, two-stage launch vehicle capable of placing a payload of a little over 2,200 pounds, or a metric ton, into low-Earth orbit.  

The details of the previous mission's failure were covered in that previously linked story from Sept. 15th. The Alpha rocket already has a mixed and frankly not very impressive record heading into this year. Firefly has only achieved two fully successful missions in six launches of the Alpha rocket. Two missions put their payloads into off-target orbits, and two Alpha launches—the rocket's debut in 2021 and the flight in April—failed to reach orbit at all. 

The company's most notable success was its Blue Ghost lunar lander program, which achieved the first fully successful landing of a commercial spacecraft on the Moon in March. NASA has selected Firefly for three more commercial landings on the Moon, and Firefly reported last week that it has an agreement with an unnamed commercial customer for an additional dedicated lunar mission.

There's some demand for a rocket like Alpha, which is larger than micro-launchers like Rocket Lab's Electron and smaller than SpaceX's Falcon 9. Lockheed Martin announced last year that it signed an agreement to purchase up to 25 Alpha launches from Firefly. The US Space Force, NASA, and National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration are also booked to fly national security and weather satellites on future Alpha missions.

As mentioned above, Firefly didn't say much today but has begun their failure analysis efforts.  Seems a safe bet that to say that the mission which was the eventual goal of today's test is going to be delayed some amount.