Firefly Aerospace seeks to raise more than $600 million through a public stock offering, an arrangement that would boost the company's market valuation to near $5.5 billion, according to a document filed with the SEC on Monday.
The launch of Firefly's Initial Public Offering (IPO) comes as the company works to build on a historic success in March, when Firefly's Blue Ghost lander touched down on the surface of the Moon. Firefly plans to sell 16.2 million shares of common stock, at a price of between $35 and $39 per share. Under those terms, Firefly could raise up to $631.8 million on the public market.
Firefly has applied to list its common stock on the Nasdaq Global Market under the ticker symbol "FLY."
In a statement, Firefly said it will use the funds to pay off a "substantial" amount of debt, support dividend payments, and "for general corporate purposes." Firefly's general corporate purposes include a spectrum of activities, and some are going better than others.
A mixed record
Blue Ghost became the first privately-owned spacecraft to pull off a fully successful landing on another world, fulfilling a $101.5 million contract from NASA to deliver a suite of scientific and tech demo experiments to the Moon. Firefly has received orders from NASA for two more lunar missions using the Blue Ghost platform, and the company is positioned to win more after completing its first Moon landing earlier this year.
Meanwhile, Firefly has struggled to build a reliable track record for its small Alpha launch vehicle, a rocket capable of placing more than a metric ton of payload into low-Earth orbit. In six launches since 2021, the Alpha rocket has logged two successful flights, two partial failures that ended up in the wrong orbit, and two missions that failed to reach orbit at all.
Most recently, the sixth flight of the Alpha rocket in April suffered a failure a few minutes after liftoff, when a mishap during stage separation damaged the rocket's second stage. Firefly has not announced a schedule for the next Alpha launch, or the results of the investigation into the April failure.
Firefly is deep into the capital-intensive development of a new medium-class rocket named Eclipse in partnership with Northrop Grumman, which made a $50 million strategic investment into Firefly in May. And Firefly is developing a spacecraft line called Elytra, a platform that can host military sensors and other payloads and maneuver them into different orbits.
IPOs again in vogue
Firefly's filing to go public harkens back to a few years ago, when numerous space companies flooded the public market, mainly through mergers with SPACs—Special Purpose Acquisition Companies. But the SPAC boom turned to bust. Many of those companies have lost value since going public, and a few have gone out of business.
One exception is Rocket Lab, which has a market valuation today of nearly $23 billion. Rocket Lab, like Firefly, has diversified its product offerings after an initial focus on launch services. Through internal investment and acquisitions, Rocket Lab now builds satellites, spacecraft components, military-grade sensors, and is developing a medium-lift rocket with comparable performance to Firefly's Eclipse.
An IPO on the upper end of Firefly's projection would net the company a market valuation of close to $5.5 billion. The stock offering amounts to about a 12 percent stake in Firefly ownership. Firefly's current primary shareholder, AE Industrial Partners, would retain about 42 percent ownership in the company and more than 50 percent of voting power after the IPO.
The financial services firm Charles Schwab reported last month that IPOs are on the comeback across multiple sectors of the market. "After a long dry spell, there are signs of life in the initial public offerings space," Charles Schwab said in June. "An increase in offerings can sometimes suggest an improvement in overall market sentiment."
Firefly is eschewing a SPAC merger in favor of a traditional IPO. Another space company, Voyager Technologies, closed an Initial Public Offering on June 11, raising nearly $383 million with a valuation peaking at $3.8 billion despite reporting a loss of $66 million in 2024. Voyager's stock price has been in a precipitous decline since then.
Financial information disclosed by Firefly in a regulatory filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission reveals the company registered $60.8 million in revenue in 2024, a 10 percent increase from the prior year. But Firefly's net loss widened from $135 million to $231 million, largely due to higher spending on research and development for the Eclipse rocket and Elytra spacecraft.
Rocket Lab, too, reported a net loss of $190 million in 2024, and another $60.6 million in the first quarter of this year. Despite this, Rocket Lab's stock price has soared for most of 2025, further confirming that near-term profits aren't everything for investors.
Chad Anderson, the founder and managing partner of Space Capital, offered a "gut check" to investors listening to his quarterly podcast last week.
"90 percent of IPOs that double on day one deliver negative returns over three years," Anderson said. "And a few breakout companies become long-term winners ... Rocket Lab being chief among them. But many fall short of expectations, even with some collapsing into bankruptcy, again, as we've seen over the last few years.
"There's a lot of excitement about the space economy, and rightly so," Anderson said. "This is a once-in-a-generation opportunity for investors, but unfortunately, I think this is going to be another example of why specialist expertise is required and the ability to read financial statements and understand the underlying business fundamentals, because what's really going to take companies through in the long term."
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