Firefly Aerospace tastes 100% success with its 1st ever rocket launch in second attempt

Firefly Aerospace’s perseverance finally paid off as the company launched its rocket to orbit for the first time ever on October 1. The Texas-based firm attained 100% success in its mission named ‘Alpha 2: To the Black’ in the second attempt after the first ended in a fiery explosion in September 2021. 

The mission ‘Alpha 2: To the Black’ involved the expendable Alpha rocket which lifted off from the Vanderberg Space Force Station in California at 12:31 pm IST to deliver three small satellites. All three payloads were deployed to the intended orbit and at 2:04 pm IST, Firefly confirmed the acquisition of signal by its customers after a successful deployment of the satellites.

Firefly tweets on successful launch

According to Firefly, all of the rocket’s engines at separate stages performed exactly as needed which helped the payloads achieve an altitude of 300 km. One of the satellites carried under this mission was ‘Serenity’ by the nonprofit Teachers in Space launched with the objective of gathering flight data for educational purposes. 

The second payload was TechEdSat-15 (TES-15) which is developed in collaboration between NASA and San Jose State University and will test the exo-brake technology to allow satellites to safely leave their orbit after they are decommissioned. The third satellite is the PicoBus which has five payloads of its own– Genesis-L & Genesis-N, from Spain’s AMSAT (Radio Amateur Satellite Corporation), Libre Space's Qubik-1 and Qubik-2 and another Spanish company Fossa Systems’ FossaSat-1B. 

According to Firefly, the Genesis pair will demonstrate a pulsed-plasma thruster system for spacecraft propulsion, the Qubik pair will perform communications experiments, and the FossaSat-1B will test new communications and remote-sensing technologies. 

Notably, Firefly aced its first flight after multiple trials and errors. The launch was initially scheduled for September 3 but several technical issues delayed the flight by two weeks. Now that the 95-foot-tall (29 meters) Alpha rocket has been tested, it will cater to Firefly’s customers. The company says that its launch vehicle is capable of carrying 1,170 kg of payload to an altitude of 200 km in the low-Earth orbit and 745 kg to 500 kg in the sun-synchronous orbit.