Firefly Aerospace Brand Guidelines: A Cedar Park Launcher, a 2017 Restart & Blue Ghost

A 2014 start-up, a 2016 shutdown and a 2017 restart.

Firefly Aerospace has two beginnings. The first was Firefly Space Systems, a start-up founded in January 2014 by Tom Markusic, P.J. King and Michael Blum with a small group of self-funding entrepreneurs, English Wikipedia says. It began in Hawthorne, California, and in November 2014 moved its headquarters to Cedar Park, a suburb of Austin, Texas. The same year it bought land in Briggs, Texas, north of Austin, for an engine test and manufacturing site, and revealed the design of a small launcher called Alpha in July 2014. Its first engine hot-fire test followed in September 2015.

That first company did not last. A legal dispute with Virgin Galactic, which began in December 2014, and the withdrawal of a major European investor left it short of money, English Wikipedia says; the whole staff was furloughed in October 2016, and by 1 December 2016 Firefly Space Systems had stopped engineering work. In March 2017 virtually all of its assets went to auction, organised by a buyer called EOS Launcher, after a foreclosure on a promissory note the company had issued to Space Florida.

EOS Launcher, backed by Noosphere Ventures, then renamed itself Firefly Aerospace, and that 2017 company is the one that trades today. This is why sources give different founding years: CNN, reporting in August 2025, described Firefly as founded in 2017 by Markusic, a former SpaceX engineer, while English Wikipedia traces the business to the 2014 start-up. Under the new owners the Alpha design was reworked with a pump-fed engine in place of the earlier aerospike layout, which pushed the first launch back by about a year.

Alpha, its engines and a lander named after an insect.

The rocket at the centre of the business is Alpha, a two-stage, expendable small launcher built around a lightweight carbon-composite structure. Its first stage uses four Reaver engines and its second stage one Lightning engine, both burning kerosene and liquid oxygen in what English Wikipedia describes as a combustion tap-off cycle. Firefly launches it from Space Launch Complex 2 at Vandenberg Space Force Base in California, and also leases Space Launch Complex 20 at Cape Canaveral in Florida.

Alpha’s record is mixed, as CNN put it in 2025. Its first flight, on 3 September 2021, suffered an anomaly during ascent and was ended by the range. The second, on 1 October 2022, reached orbit, though the satellites were left lower than planned, and in September 2023 Alpha placed a spacecraft for Millennium Space in orbit for the US Department of Defense, English Wikipedia says. In September 2025 an Alpha first stage was destroyed during a pre-flight test in Texas. Firefly says its seventh flight, “Stairway to Seven,” lifted off from Vandenberg on 11 March 2026, delivered a demonstrator payload for Lockheed Martin and tested parts of a longer Alpha Block II design.

The other half of the identity is the Moon. Firefly designed its Blue Ghost lander in Cedar Park for NASA’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services programme; English Wikipedia says it is named after the blue ghost firefly, Phausis reticulata. Blue Ghost Mission 1, named “Ghost Riders in the Sky,” launched on a SpaceX Falcon 9 on 15 January 2025 and touched down in Mare Crisium on 2 March 2025, carrying ten NASA instruments. collectSPACE reported that day that it was only the second time a privately built and operated spacecraft had safely reached the lunar surface; Firefly calls it the first fully successful commercial soft landing. In March 2026 the National Aeronautic Association named the Blue Ghost Mission 1 team as recipient of the 2025 Robert J. Collier Trophy, Firefly says.

How launch companies present themselves.

Launch companies sell something few customers ever see up close, so their public image is built almost entirely from pictures and broadcasts. The familiar set is a rocket standing on its pad at dawn or under floodlights, the long-exposure streak of an ascent across a night sky, and the plume photographed from miles down the coast. Engine test stands supply a second genre: a horizontal or downward jet of fire, usually shot from a safe distance, which stands in for years of engineering that is otherwise invisible.

Factories are shown the other way round. Clean white halls, rows of tank sections, workers in coveralls and cleanroom suits suggest order and repetition rather than drama. Many launches are also accompanied by a mission patch, a small embroidered emblem in the tradition of NASA crew patches, which turns a single flight into something that can be collected and worn.

The countdown livestream has become a format in its own right, with hosts, telemetry overlays and replays of the booster or upper stage. Not every company has worked this way: in April 2016 Inverse described one maker that gave a day’s notice of its flights and published an edited highlights video afterwards, with no live webcast. Coverage now often runs alongside posts from executives on social media, which journalists quote in their reports.

The industry also meets in person. The Space Symposium in Colorado Springs and the International Astronautical Congress, which moves to a different host city each year, are where companies unveil models, sign agreements and show their identities on stands and banners. This guide looks at what can be checked about each company: who founded it, who owns it, what it has flown, and what it says about itself.

New owners, a stock listing and a wider portfolio.

Ownership has changed twice since the restart. Noosphere Ventures funded the 2017 company and opened a research centre in Dnipro, Ukraine, in May 2018. After a review by the US Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, it was announced on 24 February 2022 that Noosphere would sell its stake to the private-equity firm AE Industrial Partners, English Wikipedia says. In August 2022 Northrop Grumman contracted Firefly to build the first stage of its Antares 300 rocket, and the two companies later named a larger shared launcher Eclipse, powered by Firefly’s Miranda engines; English Wikipedia says its first flight is expected in 2027.

Firefly became a public company in August 2025: its shares began trading on Nasdaq under the ticker FLY on 7 August, CNN reported. In November 2025 it completed the purchase of SciTec, a national-security software company, which it had announced in October. Beyond rockets and landers it sells Elytra, a family of orbital transfer vehicles, and in September 2026 it said it had agreed with SSC Space to fly two Alpha missions from Esrange Space Center in northern Sweden, targeted for no earlier than 2028. Its headquarters and factory remain in Cedar Park, with engine testing and production at Briggs.

For a design guide, Firefly Aerospace shows how a name can survive the failure of the company that coined it, and how a lander named after an insect can carry a brand further than its rockets. Compare Rocket Lab, another small-launcher maker that branched into spacecraft, and Relativity Space. For this guide we use a night-sky navy, a regolith grey and an ember orange with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Firefly Aerospace’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.