Closing Bell - Manifest Space: Blue Ghost Blasts Off with Firefly Aerospace CEO Jason Kim

Episode Date: January 9, 2025

2025 is kicking off with a series of lunar missions. As soon as next week, Firefly Aerospace’s Blue Ghost will launch for a 60 day voyage that will eventually take the lunar lander to the moon. Firefly Aerospace CEO Jason Kim joins Morgan Brennan to discuss the milestone moon mission, what he expects the $2 billion startup to accomplish this year, and what the incoming Trump administration could mean for space exploration  

Fly me to the moon! 2025 is kicking off with a series of lunar missions, starting first with US-based Firefly Aerospace. We're really excited because we have a really cordial relationship with all the commercial payload lunar services program NASA competitors. We call each other, we talk to each other, we give lessons learned to each other. We're going to learn a lot from Blue Ghost 1 and the subsequent Blue Ghost missions, and we want that to be readily available for everybody

because we want this lunar ecosystem to really be endearing. As soon as January 15th, the Ghost Riders in the Sky mission will start. When Firefly's Blue Ghost lander launches on a SpaceX rocket for a 60-day voyage that will include landing on the moon. Blue Ghost will carry payloads a SpaceX rocket for a 60-day voyage that will include landing on the moon. Blue Ghost will carry payloads and run experiments for NASA as part of the Commercial Lunar Payload Services Program, or Eclipse. But Blue Ghost is just the first. Also hitching a ride on the same rocket is Japanese company iSpaces lander,

which will take a longer route to get to the moon. And later this month, Intuitive Machines will attempt to send its second commercial lunar lander as well, a little more than a year after it made history with its first. Firefly's Blue Ghost is in focus, but new CEO Jason Kim, who took the helm in October, says all of the company's businesses are generating revenue. What I would say is a lot of people like to focus on the rocket engines or focus on the satellite software. I focus on the business and creating a business that's enduring and sustainable and growing.

So what I believe is companies like Firefly are going to continue to do really well as long as we execute. And also, we also have spacecraft and rockets. And having the end-to-end seamless capability for our customers really helps. On this episode, Firefly's Kim discusses the Milestone Moon mission, what he expects the $2 billion startup to accomplish this year, and what the incoming Trump administration could mean for space exploration. I'm Morgan Brennan, and this is Manifest Space. Joining me now, Jason Kim, the CEO of Firefly Aerospace.

And we are T-minus seven days, eight days from a major milestone for the company. That's right. We're going to the moon. All right. Talk to me about it. Well, it's one of those things when i came over to firefly on 1 october 2024 that shocked me in a good way coming into the company and finding out about missions like this i don't know anybody in the nation that doesn't want to go to the moon that's something that really excites and inspires everybody but it's really hard we know that there's going to be challenges ahead of us once Once we launch, there's a lot of critical steps that we have to do with checking out this lunar lander and the payloads.

And there's some critical steps to calibrate the propulsion system and then finally get you to the moon orbit. And then finally, the actual descent operations. It's not an easy thing. You've seen multiple people try to attempt that, and we know that it's going to be hard, but that's why I have confidence in our fireflies. That's what they like to do, very hard things really, really well. The moon is certainly littered with attempted landings, and so that's always the key is the soft landing, but we're going to get the details around that. What are the preparations right now ahead of this mission with your Blue Ghost Lander, which is going to carry payloads for NASA through CLPS and others?

It's twofold. One, we have a team of fireflies at the Cape right now, and they successfully took the vehicle from Texas to the Cape. They did all the functional checkouts of the bus. They did the checks for the payloads, battery charging, prop loading. So at this point, you know, the next steps are we got to encapsulate it and put it on the SpaceX Falcon 9 fairing. So those are the next steps that we're looking forward to. And then on the flip side in Austin, Texas, in Cedar Park, Texas, we're going to be doing multiple mission simulation rehearsals. We've done a dozen of them already. And so that's what gives us confidence, is we've got a great design, we've got a qualified system,

but we're also doing a lot of rehearsals in Austin as well with NASA, and so that's what's going on. So 45-day journey, once the the launch happens and then you attempt to land and it's a two-week mission on the surface of the moon. What goes into being able to pull off that landing? How much preparation has gone into that? And when you do talk about some of these simulations, what does that mean in terms of troubleshooting? You know, I does that mean in terms of troubleshooting?

You know, I think that's the part that we often forget. The reason why there is a rocket business is because you're launching an actual mission on orbit. And the mission really starts when you deploy the satellite or the lunar lander in space. So we have 60 days. We have to do 45 days of transit to the moon. There's a lot of checkouts, like I mentioned before, of the lunar lander and the payload. There's orbit insertion. So you have to insert the lunar lander into the lunar orbit. Then, you know, the last hour is going to be where the lunar lander is very autonomous.

That's the last time that we have hands on it. It's going to basically do everything on its own to descend. So there's a lot of preparations for that. Like I said, in Cedar Park, Texas, we're going through, there's a whole mission operations center there that we stood up in the last 18 months. And so the whole team of 60 people that are on two shifts in 24-7 hours. We're just simulating all the different anomaly events and being ready for anything. But at the end of the day, it's the people that are going to make this successful with all their rehearsals and all their trust and confidence that they have in each other, the communications that they have as well.

So we're going to be supporting that team. You know, I'll assure you that that's my job and the rest of my leadership team's job to support that team to be successful. This is going to be the first of what's expected to be a flurry of lunar lander missions this year. And actually on the same Falcon 9 rocket that's launching Blue Ghost, there is an I-Space lander that's also going to be launching. It's taking a longer route to the moon and that's for a Japanese commercial space company as well. What does it say? What does it signal about this process of going back to the moon, bringing Americans

and other humans to the moon and essentially colonizing the moon? It says it's going to be predictable and stable. It says it's going to be more routine. Taking advantage of the commercial technology that's out there that passes on the cost and schedule savings to government agencies as well as commercial companies starting up to build that lunar ecosystem is really important. These are all proof points.

So each time our competitor mates launch and attempt to land and then they stick the landings. That's good for everybody. It's all, you know, ships rise with the tides. And by the way, the moon is the whole reason why you have tides. So there's a whole connection with the lunar ecosystem. We're really excited because we have a really cordial relationship with all the commercial payload lunar services program NASA competitors. We call each other, we talk to each other, we give lessons learned to each other. We're going to learn a lot from LUGOS-1 and the subsequent LUGOS missions, and we want that to be readily available for everybody because we want this lunar ecosystem to really

be endearing. So much of this ecosystem as it's emerging right now is government driven. It's a government driven economy. What does it take to see it become more sustainable? Well, I think there's a lot of things that we're going to find out on Blue Ghost One. There's 10 payloads on there.

That's the most of any CLPS provider to date. There's things like subsurface drilling. What's the term? Drill, baby, drill. There's going to subsurface drilling. What's the term? Drill, baby, drill. There's going to be drilling on there. There's going to be some dust mitigation payloads on there. There's going to be the Lugra payload is going to actually sense the GPS system on the lunar surface. And that really helps you with future sustainable human presence on the moon as well as robotics on the moon. But what I'm looking forward to is there's a lot of minerals,

there's resources on the moon, whether it's Blue Ghost 1 or Blue Ghost 2 or the follow on Blue Ghost 3, that's looking for the water and hydrogen. Those are all things that rare earth minerals that you see on earth but maybe that's on the moon as well those are things that could enable other missions in the future so you can start using the lunar resources to do missions in space so it you know all those reasons it's it's really a endearing capability that

we're trying to set up I'm really excited about the end of our mission. We're gonna be sensing the eclipse, the Earth is gonna eclipse the Sun, and then we're gonna be able to capture in high-definition video the lunar sunset and that's something that Apollo 15 and Apollo 17 astronauts saw and they wrote notes about but no one's ever captured it in high resolution so we want to share that with the rest of the world. Can't wait to see that. This is the first of a number of missions that you've already contracted with NASA for Blue Ghosts. That's right. Yeah the second one is gonna follow on a year later and

then the third one we just were put on contract for before the holidays. That one's gonna launch in 2028 and each one has a different mission. The second Blue Ghost mission is going to go to the far side of the moon and it's actually going to be stacked on top of a secondary payload that's going to be deployed for the European Space Agency called the Lunar Pathfinder Satellite and that's going to enable future robotic missions as well in the future. And then we also have our Eletra orbital vehicle that's going to provide long-haul communications from the far side of the moon back to the Earth.

So we're really excited about that double stacked mission. That's going to do a lot of missions. I'm really excited about sensing RF, extraterrestrial kind of energy from the far side of the moon, because the moon blocks the Earth's noise as well as sometimes the solar noise. So we're gonna be able to hear things that were from millions of years ago potentially with that mission. And then the third Blue Ghost mission is gonna be really exciting because no one's ever

gone to the Groote Huizen domes. There's potentially some silica rich minerals in that area which points to water and hydrogen. Those are the resources I mentioned before. So we're going to be doing missions there and that's also a stacked mission with our Electra orbital vehicle. You mentioned the Electra orbital vehicle. This is essentially a space tug. It speaks to the fact that you have different revenue generating pieces to your portfolio. That's right. So how do you think about the space tug business and then revenue generating pieces to your portfolio.

That's right. So how do you think about the space tug business? And then we'll get into rockets too. I think the space tug, Elettra is a multi-mission orbital vehicle. So if you believe in a future of resiliency, there's going to be more orbital dynamic space operations. So you need a lot of fuel for that. Elettra has a lot of fuel.

It has in some configurations 2,000 meters per second delta V, which means you can orbit and change your orbit multiple times. Important for space operations in the future. I also think because it's doing the long haul communications mission, it makes it a very good transport layer kind of system. So we're going to be able to use it for multi-path communications and long haul communications in the future. All that said, I see it being a big part of our revenues in the next five years. So if you fast forward to 2030, the satellite part of our company at Firefly is

going to be 50% of the revenue generation, whereas the rocket with the alpha rockets and the medium launch vehicle will be the other 50%. Wow. Okay, so you expect it to grow pretty quickly over these next couple of years. Absolutely. So let's talk about the rocket business. Five attempted orbital launches, two that have been successful, including one for the Space Force. That's right. That raised a lot of eyebrows in a good way with Victus-Knox.

When is it launching again? We're going to be launching this first quarter of 2025. And so we've been actively manufacturing at rate since last year. If you look at our Series C funds, it went all to rating up our alpha production line. We expanded our Rocket Ranch facility by 100% last year. We put some automatic fiber placement machines in there so we could automate and manufacture at rate. So a lot of those lessons learned are going to be applied to 2025 where we're going to be launching multiple times. First one is going to be a first quarter for Lockheed Martin for their LM400 spacecraft. We're really excited about that. That's going to be out of Vandenberg.

Okay. In terms of that manifest, that launch manifest for Alpha, especially given the fact that it is a smaller rocket, what does that look like and how does it speak to the competitive landscape and where you fit in? You know, I think one of the things that really drew me to Firefly was, aside from being the customer on Victus Knox for the Space Force, for the 24-hour responsive launch part was that Firefly deliberately chose some really great market niches, market segments. The one-ton capability of the Alpha rocket is not surpassed by anybody right now. So a lot of these small rockets you'll see with maybe a third of that capability for mass to orbit. So every time we launch, a competitor has to launch maybe three times to get the same mass to orbit as us on our Alpha rocket.

So say, for instance, if someone launched 15 times this year, if we launch five times this year, it's equivalent mass to orbit with our competitors. So that's how I see the Alpha rocket. It's really a great capability for that one-ton capability. And that's why we have customers like Lockheed Martin. Their medium-class LM400 is not something that can launch on some of the rocket competitors that have the small rockets. Because we have the one-ton, we can get those medium-sized spacecraft onto orbit as well. And so I'm really bullish about what you know, what we're doing with

Lockheed Martin. They're our first launch of the year and we're prioritizing that. Do you compete though in terms of when you think about rideshare missions from SpaceX with Falcon 9 and Starship at some point going to come online? Yeah, if you look at other industries like the, you know, terrestrial railroad industry or the shipping industry, whether it's land, sea or air, there's always one size does not fit all. You could have a whole school bus of kids going to school, but what about that kid that broke their leg and you got to get to the urgent care? You still need a capability to take someone somewhere responsibly anywhere, anytime.

And that's what our responsive capability enables with our Alpha Rocket is if a customer really needs to launch something with high priority to meet an urgent need or fill an urgent gap, we're the company that can do that reliably and repeatedly. You've got a bigger rocket. It's still on the smaller scale within the launch classes of vehicles. But you have another rocket, the MLV, that you're developing with Northrop Grumman as well. When does that come online? That's right. You know, A330 will be our first part of that story. We'll be delivering the first stage of the A330 rocket to North of Grumman by the end of the year. That's also the first stage of the medium launch vehicle.

And so that reduces tremendous risk by delivering that with our seven Miranda engines. What I would say about that is Firefly literally chose a really good market segment for that. That's a 16 metric ton market segment. What that capability does is we are leveraging our alpha rocket designs. Our Reaver engine has Flight Heritage. It's scaled to a larger size for our Miranda engine. That's how we've been able to stay on schedule. In 18 months from a clean scratch design, we delivered our Miranda engine and we've

tested it over 50 times already. And so we've taken it to 100% thrust. For our first stage tanks and our structures we've also done load testing and passed those tests as well last year and so having the capability of alpha and using the same carbon composite primary structures and the same engine technology with our tap off capability and our relight capability scaled for the Miranda really keeps us on schedule. One of the things that I find so fascinating is the fact that Firefly has taken this approach, this strategy of partnering with all the defense primes and sort of the established space players.

How does it speak to how this ecosystem evolves where Firefly fits in, especially given the fact that your own background, you've worked at most of these primes, including most recently Millennial, which is part of Boeing. Yeah, I take that as a good thing because you learn a lot from all these roles. I would say that I was at Reagan National Defense Forum with you, and it's pretty ironic that you had everyone on stage that was literally a customer in National Defense Forum with you and it's pretty ironic that you had everyone on stage that was literally a customer in National Defense for Firefly. You had Jim Tacklett from Lockheed Martin, you had Derek Tourneur from Space Development Agency, you had General Gutlein from the Space Force who we did responsive space

for, and you had Honorable Whitman there too and we do launch operations out of Wallops. So literally you had all of our customers there like you should have been on stage with us well I love that invitation someday but yeah that was a great panel that you moderated and I listened to every bit of it because I do think space is the ultimate high ground and you know national security space is something near and dear to my heart and the Fireflies hearts because we care about our nation we want to keep our nation safe and our warfighters come back home safely so things like responsive space we're gonna double down on that this year we're gonna do even

more responsive space launch missions and we really want to be the best at that when you say responsive space missions are you referring to what we saw for example with Victus Nox which also involved Millennium, as you just referenced before? Are you going to see more of those types of missions, or is it going to be other things as well, to the extent you can talk about them when we are talking about national security? You know, I think it's a capability for deterrence. And so if you can respond with a capability that can deter our adversaries, that is in the category of responsive space.

It could be a timeline metric of 24 hour launches. It could be, hey, I need to get to this particular high altitude orbit and this inclination that very few people go to. Or it could be, you know, there's an urgent gap and you've got to gap fill it. There's a number of urgent priorities that the nation needs, and we want to just be able to be there when they need us. So I'm going to ask you the big question, which is also something that came up on that stage at the Reagan National Defense Forum, and that is

when you look at some of the antagonistic capabilities that are being developed by U.S. rivals, is U.S. deterrence where it needs to be? I think we always have to stay ahead. It's not something that, you know, you do once and you're good. You always have to stay ahead of the threats. And so whether that's exercises that you can do to prepare non-material solutions such as just the rehearsals that we talked about earlier with our whole multi-domain capability in the nation or investing in R&D to you know stay ahead of those adversary threats based on intelligence. I think that there's also contractual things that you could do too you know I think the nation would do a great job to help us be more secure if we can order more long lead items for all the contractors so we can stockpile the long lead items so that we can increase the confidence in our scheduled delivery of these responsive missions. I'm going to shift gears a little bit here before we wrap this up. You took the helm of Firefly October 1st. Given your background to be at a commercial space

upstart now, what has that process been like and what should we expect from you and from the company in 2025 and beyond? Well, this, you know, coming from Texas is not my first rodeo. Millennium, as you know, was a startup commercial as well. I think having that experience with another company and running another company gives me a lot of good foundational principles for Firefly. What I would say is a lot of people like to focus on the rocket engines or focus on the satellite software. I focus on the business and creating a business that's enduring and sustainable and growing. So what I believe is companies like Firefly are going to continue to do really well as long as we execute.

And also, we also have spacecraft and rockets. And having the end-to-end seamless capability for our customers really helps. So I think, you know, from a financial perspective, perspective you know launch could be very very lumpy you recognize revenues every time you launch but on the spacecraft side you're just recognizing revenue as you do the work and you achieve those milestones so having the diversification of both is really great. Having the diversification of commercial as well as NASA civil as well as national security customers and missions is really helpful for business So, you know, I think about that constantly is how do we do all the things we need to do for our customers and our stakeholders?

How do we execute that's the number one goal at firefly? And so you mentioned all of your businesses are revenue generating. That's right. You've also recently closed another round of funding. Yes. Is that something you'll, do you feel you'll have to go back to the capital markets sooner rather than later? And I guess, how are you also thinking about a potential IPO then? You know, the first part of that question is, we're always looking for select qualified investors.

We get a lot of inquiries. We were oversubscribed in our Series D. And so that is always up for discussion. And I welcome that. The second part of that question, I think it's still early to predict what the best path forward is. I think we have a lot of smart people and partners that help us make those kind of decisions. But at the end of the day, what really propels companies like Firefly is the autonomy and decision-making. We know the capabilities and the market and the players really, really well. We want to be able to make the decisions in the right manner

to execute everything we have on our plate as well as more. And finally, we have a new administration coming in. We know there is an excitement within this administration around space. How do you expect that policy to evolve? It just goes back to simply, there's a need, there's a threat out there, and national security is very important.

And companies like Firefly have demonstrated capability in supporting that capability in space and as long as we execute and we say what we're going to do in terms of launch cadence and delivering our spacecraft and sticking the landing on lunar surface as long as we execute we'll be in a really really good position for this next administration if you remember who started when when the Space Force started, it happened in the 2016 to 2020 timeframe. And that's where we set a standard according to General Saltzman, who's the CSO of the Space Force. We set the gold standard for responsive space timelines with our Victus Knox mission. We plan to do more tactically responsive space missions.

Jason Kim of Firefly Aerospace. It's great to speak with you. Thank you. Great to meet you. That does it for this episode of Manifest Space. Make sure you never miss a launch by following us wherever you get your podcasts and by watching our coverage on Closing Bell Overtime. I'm Morgan Brennan.