Northrop Grumman is investing $50 million in Firefly Aerospace to further jointly develop a new medium-lift rocket with a reusable stage. Its debut could take place as early as 2026.
The announcement of the collaboration was published on May 29. Northrop Grumman joined the $175 million Series D funding round announced by Firefly in November. During this round, the company was valued at more than $2 billion.
The investment will be used to develop a medium-class launch vehicle, previously known as MLV, which has now been renamed Eclipse. It is 59 meters long and capable of delivering up to 16.3 tons of cargo to low Earth orbit and up to 3.2 tons of cargo to geostationary transfer orbit.
Eclipse is a continuation of the existing partnership between Firefly and Northrop on the Antares 330 project, in which the Ukrainian-made first stage used in an earlier version of Antares was replaced with a stage developed by Firefly (this was done due to the consequences of Russia’s large-scale invasion of Ukraine). Eclipse will use the same first stage developed by Firefly, along with a new upper stage and a larger payload fairing. Another important difference is that while the first stage of Antares 330 is disposable, in the case of Eclipse, it will return to Earth and be reused.
While Antares 330 is an intermediate vehicle designed primarily to launch Cygnus cargo spacecraft to the ISS, Firefly aims to use Eclipse more broadly in both commercial and national security applications. This will be done as part of the National Security Space Launch under the (NSSL) Phase 3 contract, the first stage of which is intended for new launch vehicles debuting on the market.
At present, Eclipse’s first flight is scheduled for 2026. The rocket will be launched from the MARS spaceport located on Wallops Island off the coast of Virginia.
According to Firefly
