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We welcome now our Bloomberg TV and radio audiences because joining us now is Firefly Aerospace CEO Jason Kim, joining us from the NASAC awaiting the trading debut. First of all, congratulations on the IPO Jason, great to have you with us. Talk to us first about why now. We were just talking about this heating up that we're seeing in the IPO market. You're seeing more companies actually come out of the pipeline after what's been pretty quiet couple of years.
Why did you pick this particular moment.
Well, it was always part of our strategy. I mean, if you look at what we've been doing. We got orbital flight heritage on our Alpha rocket on our second launch, and we landed on the Moon just in March of this year, at something that's really hard. Space is hard, but landing on the Moon is even harder, and this
company did it successfully. And then if you look at what we're doing, we have a production line of Alpha rockets, and we're building our Eclipse reusable sixteen ton rocket as well as lunar landers annually, and we're building Electra spacecraft to serve you know, the Golden Dome customer space exploration as well as commercial teket And so if you look at what the CEO of NASDAC said, a Data Friedman, you know, the markets are strong and they're growing, and
we've gotten really great reception and conviction from investor investors over time, and so this is the right moment.
You're going to raise almost a billion dollars looks like eight hundred and sixty eight million dollars. Jason, what are you going to do with the money?
Well, you know, it's kind of like what I already said. We're going to rate up. We're going to continue to increase capacity because there's so much more demand in the space markets right now because of national security, because of space exploration. To the Moon. You know, the Moon is really important. It's the ultimate high ground. It's also important if we're going to put humans on the Moon again starting in a couple of years, we want to know
everything about the move. We want to put more lunar enters up there, more infrastructure, more power systems up there too. So we want to make the Moon more frictionalists for everybody, for America first.
And we're just seeing this headline cross the terminal now that the Firefly IPO said to end more than twenty times over subscribe, so plenty of demand there. Jason, Let's talk a little bit more about the actual business and what the status of Eclipse is as I understand it. That's your rocket that's meant to compete against the Falcon nine. How is that going.
Well, we see the Falcon nine as very complimentary. That's looking at the heavy and super heavy market and a lot of that is going towards good use to launch starlinks.
But the rest of the world needs launch capacity and in twenty twenty seven it's going to be really scarce, and so that's why our target of launching our first Eclipse in the fourth quarter of twenty twenty six is perfect timing because we'll be able to provide more supply of medium launch for Nest Security Space Launch Program customers as well as the commercial customers. They're putting up a lot of great advanced technology that are in abundant quantities for those proliferic constellations.
You you know, you mentioned Adina. You're at the NASDAQ obviously tried and true storied index there and business, but did you think about TXSE. You're from Texas.
Well. Texas is a great place to do business. I've run previous companies and you know, Texas is just at the forefront. You know, they have the Texas Space Commission. And we received a eight point two million dollars grant in twenty twenty five and we're going to use that to expand our production line of concurrent builds of our
Blue Ghost Lunar landers. As you know, as of last Tuesday, NASA awarded us our fourth blue Ghost Ludar Lander for one hundred and seventy eight million dollars and we're just proud of the team. We're going to kick that program off next week and we're hiring a lot of great talent. So if there's people that want to come and do bold missions and do more of what they want to do, Fireflies the place to do.
That, all right.
I appreciate the update there on that contract too. I want to talk a little bit about the Alpha rocket as well. When you think about your long term strategy, where does Alpha fit in? How important is that?
Alpha is so important because it's the only one ton to space rocket in the market with orbital flight heritage. We're rating up right now because there's so much more demand than there is supply, and so we want to be able to address that demand. So there's demand in the tactically response to space market from the Space Force. They want to keep ahead of the threats and we did that with our Victimsknox mission in twenty twenty three.
We were the first to successfully launch in a twenty four hour timeline, shattering the twenty one day previous record and it became the gold standard for launch in space. And then if you look at you know commercial customers, they want dedicated rights to mission unique orbits to generate revenue from their business models. And then finally we onboarded onto the Missile Defense Agency MAC TB two point zero program and that's an IDIQ where we'll start manifesting launches
of three to four hypersonic missiles at a time. There's a lot of economies of scale with that, so there is so much demand for the one ton off of rocket. All right, very cool stuff.
We look forward to talking to you again, Jason Firefly Aerospace CEO Jason cam talking to us on the debut of their public offering