Five years ago, Tom Markusic’s rocket company Firefly Space Systems filed for bankruptcy. This week, Tom Markusic’s rocket company Firefly Aerospace announced that it will aim for its first launch in mid-March, try to raise $350 million in capital and attempt a Moon landing on behalf of NASA in 2023, Bloomberg News reported. Based just outside of Austin, Tex., Firefly has been trying to carve out a unique path in the suddenly frenetic commercial space industry. The company does not make huge rockets like Elon Musk’s SpaceX, nor does it make small rockets like Peter Beck’s Rocket Lab, and a number of other start-ups. Its first rocket — called Alpha — can carry about 2,200 pounds of cargo into orbit for $15 million per flight, making it the space transport equivalent of a minivan in a landscape so far dominated by 18-wheelers and sedans. Whether or not Alpha can fly and do its job remains anyone’s guess. The first Alpha is currently being primed for takeoff at a pad located at Vandenberg Air Force Base, a little more than an hour northwest of Santa Barbara, California. The launch — months, arguably years, behind schedule — does finally seem ready to occur next month so long as the ever-fickle Rocket Gods feel generous. “This is the final push,” said Markusic, Firefly’s CEO. “We are all-in every day.” It’s a business miracle that Markusic, a veteran of NASA and SpaceX, is in the position to give Alpha a go. When the start-up he co-founded in 2014 went bankrupt two years later, it appeared that Firefly Space Systems would have its story end before it ever really began. Markusic, though, found a rescue plan in the form of Max Polyakov, a Ukrainian multi-millionaire who made his fortune in business software and a mix of gaming, dating and advertising web sites. Over the past few years, Polyakov has put $200 million into the rebranded Firefly Aerospace and ranks right alongside Musk and Jeff Bezos, who founded the rocket company Blue Origin, in terms of individuals who have sunk the most personal capital into space ventures.
