Firefly Aerospace

Firefly Aerospace is a launch and spacecraft company that went public in August 2025 on the NASDAQ under the ticker FLY. Founded in 2017 and headquartered in Cedar Park, Texas, it builds the Alpha small-launch rocket, the Eclipse medium launch vehicle co-developed with Northrop Grumman, Blue Ghost lunar landers for NASA's commercial lunar program, and Elytra orbital transfer and servicing vehicles. In March 2025 its Blue Ghost Mission 1 achieved the first fully successful commercial soft landing on the Moon.

Firefly's core identity is space hardware and launch, but through two acquisitions it has become a genuine AI adopter. In 2025 it acquired SciTec (a roughly $855 million deal), whose FORGE system runs operationally for the US Space Force performing real-time, AI-enabled missile- and threat-detection. In 2026 it acquired Space-ng, an AI computer-vision navigation company whose team traces to OpenCV — its co-founder Ethan Rublee, an OpenCV co-founder, became Firefly's Chief Engineer of Software.

Space-ng's vision-based terrain-relative navigation and hazard avoidance flew on Blue Ghost, autonomously computing landing maneuvers in real time — the first commercial lunar lander to do so. Firefly now offers that autonomy stack, including the Sol3 development kit, to government and commercial customers under its own brand.

The honest framing: Firefly is a launch and spacecraft company first, and its AI capabilities entered largely through acquisition rather than being its founding purpose. But its computer-vision autonomy — proven on an actual lunar landing — and its operational defense-AI software are real products, not incidental, which is why it belongs on the platform as a space-and-defense company with a genuine, if secondary, AI story.