After landing on the moon, Firefly Aerospace is counting down to a listing that might value the firm at $5 bln. It’s punchy next to Rocket Lab or SpaceX, though growing demand and a backlog add fuel. Issue is, upstarts face costly setbacks: recently floated rivals are burning up.
People work in a lab at the Firefly Aer ospace mission operations center in Leander, Texas, U.S., July 9, 2025. REUTERS/Sergio Flores/File photo NEW YORK, July 28 - What’s harder: blasting a 100,000-pound object into the sky at over 17,000 miles per hour, or launching onto public markets? Failures among space-bound rocket-makers suggest that financial liftoff might be trickier.
Firefly Aerospace, having recently landed a vehicle on the moon, is now looking to pull it off,. The company’s business is growing rapidly, with a backlog of orders standing at about $1 billion adding some thrust to its effort. Snag is, the punchy valuation faces the same issues that burned up similar firms. Over 2,500 objects were put into space last year, the European Space Agency reckons, ten times more than a decade ago. Much of this growth, though, comes from Elon Musk-run SpaceX. It has launched more than 8,000 satellites for its Starlink internet service since 2020.This explosive yet concentrated growth lays bare the peril of space. Satellites have become cheaper to build, shrinking in size and growing in capability. Rivals from Amazon.com to global governments want to match Starlink’s success. Yet scale is crucial: development costs are immense, compounded by inevitable failures - after all, even SpaceX still loses rockets to gigantic fireballs. Reducing cost per trip requires spreading expenses over more launches. There are, at least, adjacent markets for space entrepreneurs, ranging from the established - like snapping images of Earth - to the unlikely, like, Firefly is eyeing a market capitalization of $5.3 billion at the middle of its target price range. Including expected debt and cash raised, that puts its enterprise valuation at about $4.6 billion. If the pace of its $71 million in revenue for the first half of the year holds, that would value Firefly at over 30 times sales, slightly above rival Rocket Lab. Still-private SpaceX sits at 26 times, going by a recently mooted $400 billion valuation, according to Bloomberg, and a projected $15.5 billion in revenue. Firefly’s revenue has more than doubled year-over-year; continued growth might make it look cheaper. Yet the company faces competition from numerous startups, while directly taking on SpaceX in its home markets is daunting. Moreover, space cowboys have quickly run into trouble before.in 2023. Astra Space went private after nearly going bust multiple times. Sidus Space saw its stock fall 40% on Monday after announcing a capital raise. Even Firefly’s predecessor company went belly-up. What goes up has a tendency to come back down.Firefly Aerospace plans to sell up to 18.6 million shares at a price range of between $35 and $39 each in an initial public offering. At the middle of the range, the maker of spacecraft and launch vehicles would have a market capitalization of $5.3 billion.The company said that it expects to have generated approximately $71 million in revenue for the first half of 2025, compared to $29 million in the same period last year. Operating cash burn is expected to be around $86 million, while a backlog of orders stands at about $1.1 billion. Robert Cyran, U.S. tech columnist, joined Breakingviews in London in 2003 and moved four years later to New York, where he continues to cover global technology, pharmaceuticals and special situations. Robert began his career at Forbes magazine, where he assisted in the startup of the international version of the magazine. Before working at Breakingviews he worked as a market researcher and reporter covering the pharmaceutical industry. Robert has a Masters degree in economics from Birmingham University and an undergraduate degree from George Washington University.
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