Firefly Aerospace CEO Jason Kim is working ‘maniacally’ to scale

Jason Kim just nabbed one of the most coveted yet high-pressure C-suite gigs in the space industry.

As the new CEO of rocket and spacecraft builder Firefly Aerospace, he’s no longer under the Boeing umbrella after leaving his previous role leading their satellite-making subsidiary Millennium. And he’s joined an operation that’s in rarefied air — as one of only four companies in the U.S. with an operational orbital rocket — with growing spacecraft and lunar lander product lines.

But now he’s taking on a launch market dominated by Elon Musk’s SpaceX. Legacy player ULA and rising challenger Rocket Lab are also ramping up their efforts in the market — with Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin hot on their heels.

But Kim is unfazed. He sees gaps in the launch market for Firefly’s Alpha and coming MLV rockets, which slot into the middle of the small-to-heavy class of vehicles. 

“In the history of the world, we started with the sea and then we went to rail, roads and then airplanes. I think space is the next big transportation play. It’s a new category that Firefly is going to help create,” Kim told CNBC, speaking in his first interview since joining the company at the start of this month.

Millennium worked alongside Firefly last year when it launched the Space Force’s experimental Victus Nox mission, so Kim said he’d already seen first-hand the “unstoppable” attitude and “calculated risk taking” of Firefly employees.

“I’m thrilled to be here. … I’m going to work maniacally to support this team so that we can achieve all of our visionary ideas,” Kim said.

Firefly’s previous CEO was in the job for less than two years before a shock exit in July after reported allegations of an inappropriate employee relationship. It was the latest in what’s been a rollercoaster existence for Firefly. It was founded, went through bankruptcy, got restarted and underwent a federally-forced-ownership swap all in its past decade of existence.

All the while, Firefly’s pushed forward. Building and testing at its “Rocket Ranch” outside Austin, Texas, the 700-person company has launched its Alpha rocket five times from California’s Vandenberg Space Force Base, reaching its intended orbit successfully on two of those.

Firefly majority owner AE Industrial Partners moved quickly this summer to bring Kim over from Millennium, as he said he got a call three days after Firefly’s prior leader exited. Kim said being CEO of Firefly “was never in my road map” but emphasized that he was excited for the new challenge.

“What I’ve learned through running multiple companies is that I think autonomy is something that is very precious when you’re running a company, and that autonomy helps you make the best decisions. You use your funds in the best manner to scale, to create differentiators. It helps you continue to grow and innovate at a very rapid pace. And so I would say that Firefly and autonomy are synonymous. That’s what’s going to help us grow and continue to evolve and be sustainable,” Kim said.

Firefly has three main product lines: its rockets, Alpha and MLV; space tugs, called Elytra, and lunar landers, known as Blue Ghost. Kim said all of the company’s product lines are revenue generating, though he declined to say how much money they’re bringing in, and added that the company’s kicked off fundraising a round of capital “with a new lead investor.”

“We’re already seeing significant demand [from investors] … more to come on that soon, but that’s going to help us with all the scaling that we need to do,” Kim said.

The core of Firefly’s bid to be an end-to-end space transportation company is its rockets. 

Alpha, standing at 95 feet tall, is designed to launch about 1,000 kilograms of payload to orbit — at a price of $15 million per launch.

MLV (Medium Launch Vehicle), standing at 183 feet, is designed to launch as much as 16,300 kilograms of payload to orbit. The intended successor to Northrop Grumman’s Antares rockets, the pair of companies are co-developing MLV and aim to launch it for the first time in 2026.

Alpha and MLV both fit in the middle of the rocket market, between Rocket Lab’s “small” Electron and the “heavy” rockets such as SpaceX’s Falcon 9.

“The small-medium-large model is critical to support all the different needs of the market. … There’s no one size fits all kind of approach,” Kim said.

Kim sees Firefly as having a key advantage — “an engine that works” — in its Reaver engines that power the Alpha rockets. And for MLV, Kim said Firefly took that “great engine technology” and “scaled it up to become Miranda, so you’re not starting from scratch” with a new engine.

“We’re making huge strides on MLV,” Kim said. “We’ve had 50 Miranda engine tests already.” 

Before MLV debuts, Firefly will also be delivering part of Northrop’s Antares 330 rocket, with a first stage similar to MLV’s, by the third quarter of next year.

Additionally, while Firefly’s Alpha may not be reusable, the company has “purposely designed the MLV for reusability.”

“We’re closer to how SpaceX tackled [rocket reuse],” Kim said, referencing how SpaceX added the landing capability of its Falcon 9 rockets over time.

“We want to get some launches to orbit first before we tackle the ‘return to launch site’ part of it,” Kim added. “I do believe that reusability is going to help along the [launch] cadence of the MLV program, but for Alpha, we’re going to just get to our numbers by pure just cadence.”

Firefly has built up a backlog of launches for Alpha, signing deals for upward of 50 launches. That includes bulk orders from Lockheed Martin and L3Harris, as well as trio of launches for startup True Anomaly, one being part of the Space Force’s latest responsive launch mission Victus Haze. 

The company focused on infrastructure expansion this year, more than doubling Rocket Ranch’s footprint to over 200,000 square feet of floor space. Next year, Kim aims for Firefly to conduct four to six Alpha launches and then double that annually until Alpha is flying twice a month, or 24 launches a year.

“We could have prioritized doing more Alpha launches this year but instead we prioritized scaling up for the future,” Kim said.

Firefly has another major debut coming up even sooner: The launch of its first Blue Ghost lunar lander is scheduled for December and is set to touch down on the moon’s surface 45 days after that.

Seven feet tall and 12 feet in diameter, Blue Ghost is flying cargo under NASA’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services program. Firefly is one of three U.S. companies to win CLPS mission contracts. NASA in 2021 awarded Firefly with a $93 million contract for Blue Ghost Mission 1, to deliver 10 research payloads to the moon.

“Any time you go to the moon, the whole world is watching. And when we land that thing, like Simone Biles sticks the landing in the Olympics, we’re going to be a different company,” Kim said.

Firefly’s other spacecraft is its Elytra line of space tugs, also known as orbital transfer vehicles. The trio —Dawn, Dusk, and Dark — are increasingly large spacecraft that can delivery spacecraft and payloads to orbits ranging from low-above Earth to orbiting the moon.

“[Elytra] is getting the least amount of attention right now at Firefly publicly, but I think in about five years, it’s going to be a flywheel constellation program that’s servicing different missions. And so that’s where my expertise being a satellite manufacturer comes into play, is we can take something like Elytra and turn it into a multi-mission constellation capability,” Kim said.

Kim has only just joined Firefly but he said he already has a clear sense of how the company needs to progress.

“I’ve run companies before. At the end of the day, we have to execute. We’ve got to get a cadence. … As long as you execute, you can keep going bigger and bigger and bolder and bolder,” Kim said.