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Globe and Mail
2 days ago
- Business
- Globe and Mail
The Largest Space Tech IPO of the Year Just Launched, With a $6.3 Billion Valuation. Can the Stock Go to the Moon?
Key Points Firefly Aerospace has notched some operational successes with its rockets and lunar lander. The company's partnerships with major industry players could be advantageous. But Firefly's incomplete financial and management picture should give investors pause. 10 stocks we like better than Firefly Aerospace › Firefly Aerospace (NASDAQ: FLY) just pulled off its second -most impressive launch of the year. The most impressive launch came in January, when the company sent its new uncrewed Blue Ghost module to the moon. The mission's success gave Firefly bragging rights as the first U.S. company to execute a fully successful soft lunar landing (that is, landing without causing serious damage to the module). It also generated a huge wave of interest in the company. Where to invest $1,000 right now? Our analyst team just revealed what they believe are the 10 best stocks to buy right now. Continue » That interest is clearly still white-hot, because Firefly's Thursday IPO launched the company onto the Nasdaq at a valuation of $6.3 billion. Can it rocket even higher? Or will it fall back to earth? What Firefly actually does Fans of the canceled-way-too-soon space Western Firefly will be sad to learn that the company's name isn't actually related to the TV series. Instead, it's a name Firefly founder Tom Markusic -- a former SpaceX and Virgin Galactic (NYSE: SPCE) engineer -- selected to embody a hypothetical future in which rocket launches are as common in the night sky as fireflies. Indeed, Firefly Aerospace has gone all-in on making launches more frequent and more accessible. It developed the Alpha rocket, a smaller, lighter rocket manufactured from carbon fiber composites that launched a satellite into orbit with just 24 hours' notice in 2023. While the Alpha is certainly lighter (and thus, less expensive to launch) than most other commercial rockets, the roughly one-ton payload capacity is somewhat restrictive: Firefly's Blue Ghost lunar lander, for example, was too heavy for the Alpha rocket and had to be launched using a SpaceX Falcon 9. Firefly is also working on the Elytra orbital vehicle and lunar imaging service Ocula. The company has nine planned non-test missions through 2029: five for NASA, one for the U.S. Space Force, and three for commercial clients, for a total current project backlog of $1.1 billion. Why its stock might take off... With more companies (and people) heading to space, demand for cheaper spaceflight is likely to skyrocket (no pun intended). As a company offering a more affordable rocket that has already had successful launches, Firefly is well ahead of many would-be competitors. Additionally, Firefly is receiving investment and support from industry heavyweights including Lockheed Martin (NYSE: LMT) and L3Harris (NYSE: LHX). In May, Firefly received a $50 million investment from Northrop Grumman (NYSE: NOC). Being in the good graces of such major aerospace players is a big advantage for the start-up, both financially and reputationally. Today's commercial space industry is a fairly crowded place, with companies big and small jockeying for limited funds and contracts. However, early success tends to encourage investment, which fuels future success. Firefly seems to have all the right ingredients, including an active contract pipeline, major industry partnerships, and a few successful early missions. If it can keep it up, it could be the next maybe an even bigger success story. ...and why it might not For an 11-year-old company, Firefly has had a checkered past, which includes IP issues, a 2017 bankruptcy, government intervention over national security concerns, and an abrupt July 2024 CEO departure (current CEO Jason Kim took the helm in October 2024). Meanwhile, private equity firm AE Industrial Partners controls the company with a 40.9% stake; the firm's employees currently hold five of Firefly's nine board seats. As the IPO prospectus notes, "AE Industrial Partners controls us, and its interests may conflict with ours or yours in the future." That's...a lot, and we haven't even gotten to the company's financials. Because it's an IPO, we don't even have a full quarterly financial report from Firefly yet. But its IPO prospectus shows a net loss of about $125 million in the first half of 2025, along with negative free cash flow of about $97.5 million, with just $205.3 million in cash on its balance sheet and $173.6 million in debt. Not a pretty picture. Now, it's not unusual for new start-ups to have high net losses and negative free cash flow, but given the lack of context and details, it's worth asking: Does this business deserve a $6.3 billion valuation? How about $8.4 billion, which the company briefly hit on its first day of public trading Thursday? To me, that seems pretty expensive for an unproven business with opaque financials in a competitive, high-risk industry that's controlled by a venture capital firm and led by a brand new CEO. Before I'd buy shares, I'd want to at least see a few quarterly reports to get a clearer picture of how the company operates. It would still be a risky bet, but right now it feels too risky to buy. Should you invest $1,000 in Firefly Aerospace right now? Before you buy stock in Firefly Aerospace, consider this: The Motley Fool Stock Advisor analyst team just identified what they believe are the 10 best stocks for investors to buy now… and Firefly Aerospace wasn't one of them. The 10 stocks that made the cut could produce monster returns in the coming years. Consider when Netflix made this list on December 17, 2004... if you invested $1,000 at the time of our recommendation, you'd have $653,427!* Or when Nvidia made this list on April 15, 2005... if you invested $1,000 at the time of our recommendation, you'd have $1,119,863!* Now, it's worth noting Stock Advisor's total average return is 1,060% — a market-crushing outperformance compared to 182% for the S&P 500. Don't miss out on the latest top 10 list, available when you join Stock Advisor. See the 10 stocks » *Stock Advisor returns as of August 4, 2025
The Guardian
2 days ago
- Science
- The Guardian
Jim Lovell obituary
Just after 9.20pm, Houston time, on Monday 13 April 1970, Jim Lovell, who has died aged 97, looked out of the left side window of Odyssey, the command module of the Apollo 13 lunar mission. Caught in the sunlight was what looked like smoke, which Lovell believed, correctly, was oxygen. It was pouring out of the service module, the technological core of the spacecraft. Lovell and his fellow crew members, Fred Haise and Jack Swigert, were 205,000 miles from Earth. Thirteen minutes earlier, a muffled explosion had rocked Apollo 13 and Lovell now realised that 'we were in serious trouble' and, unlike Apollo 11's Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin, or Apollo 12's Pete Conrad and Alan Bean, he would never fulfil his life's ambition to walk on the moon. Indeed the issue for Lovell, the commander of Apollo 13, had now become whether he and the other two astronauts would even walk on Earth again. The catastrophe – the culmination of a series of earlier technological and maintenance errors on Earth – risked turning the Odyssey into Nasa's mausoleum, destined to orbit moon and Earth indefinitely, with its three astronauts inside. Almost nine months had elapsed since Apollo 11 and Armstrong's 'giant leap for mankind'. Apollo 12 had followed in November 1969. By the time Apollo 13 took off, media space fatigue had set in. At 9pm on that fateful Monday the astronauts had completed a live broadcast to Earth – which went largely unwatched. Given the choice between Lovell and co and the Doris Day Show, CBS had opted for Doris, and neither NBC nor ABC had carried the transmission. Apollo 13 was approaching its target in the moon highland area of Fra Mauro. There, Lovell and Haise were set to board the lunar module, Aquarius, and land on the moon, leaving Swigert orbiting on the Odyssey. But when Swigert flicked a switch for a routine 'cryo-stir' of the liquid oxygen and hydrogen tanks in the service module that provided the spacecraft with air, water and electricity, a short circuit led to a fire, which led to an explosion in oxygen tank two – and tank one was leaking. At 9.08pm Swigert uttered the words that, with a change of tense – made for the 1995 film Apollo 13 – went into history: 'OK Houston, we've had a problem', a phrase echoed seconds later by Lovell. Neither mission control nor the crew could initially work out what that problem was. Intense debate ensued, in space and in Houston. The 20-mile cloud of gas and detritus could be seen from Earth. What followed was an extraordinary display of heroism and ingenuity. In a fraught operation the command module was shut down, conserving its internal batteries (and hence power for re-entry to Earth's atmosphere) and by the end of that day Lovell and his comrades had moved into their 'lifeboat', the lunar module, with minimal power and water. The craft then looped around the moon and, early the following morning, fired the lunar module's descent engine to alter the trajectory. Passing around the moon, the astronauts reached the greatest distance from the Earth ever achieved by human beings, 248,655 miles (more than 400,000km). Lovell later realigned the craft and fired the descent engine to target the south-west Pacific recovery area. Odyssey – used as a 'bedroom' by the crew – was no warmer than a refrigerator. The interior of Aquarius, meanwhile, was covered in condensation, 'three men cold as frogs in a frozen pond' was Lovell's description. All three men became dehydrated, and Haise contracted a kidney infection. Aquarius, designed to carry two men for two days, had to carry three, for four. On the Wednesday, in a piece of masterly improvisation devised between Houston and Apollo 13, the astronauts constructed a purifier to cut potentially lethal carbon dioxide levels. Later that day Lovell honed the trajectory to ensure the craft hit the middle of the 10-mile-wide entry corridor into the Earth's atmosphere – the alternatives were death in orbit or burn-up. Exhausted and severely dehydrated, Lovell repeated the operation early on the Friday morning of touchdown. At 7.14am the service module was jettisoned. At 10.43am, with the lunar module Aquarius evacuated and the crew back on Odyssey, Aquarius was jettisoned. At 12.07pm Odyssey splashed into the Pacific, 6.4km from the recovery ship USS Iwo Jima – from whose decks wafted the strains of Aquarius, a song from the musical Hair, played by the ship's band. 'As long as we were still breathing and had methods to figure out solutions to our predicament,' Lovell recalled a quarter of a century later, 'we kept going.' Lovell was born in Cleveland, Ohio, the son of Blanche (nee Masek), and James Lovell. His father, a coal furnace salesman, was killed in a car accident when Jim was five, and he and his mother moved to Milwaukee. The boy was fascinated by rocketry, and by the pioneers of the interwar and wartime period. As a teenager at Juneau high school in Milwaukee he built – and launched – his own rocket. His uncle had been a first world war naval flier and, while in his senior school year, Lovell applied to the US Naval Academy at Annapolis, Maryland – but was turned down. Money was tight, so he applied for, and was accepted on, the navy's Holloway plan, which gave him two years of a free engineering course at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, plus flight training, sea duty and a commission. After two years it also led a senior officer to suggest to Lovell that he should renew his application to Annapolis. He was accepted, wrote his thesis on liquid fuelled rocketry, graduated in 1952, and soon afterwards married his childhood sweetheart, Marilyn Gerlach. After serving on the aircraft carrier USS Shangri-La he spent four years as a test pilot at what was then the Naval Air Test Center in Patuxent, Maryland, managing the McDonnell Douglas F4H Phantom jet fighter programme. He was also safety officer with Fighter Squadron 101 in Oceana, Virginia. Lovell applied for, and was turned down, by Nasa, for its Mercury programme, which, between 1962 and 1963, focused on getting astronauts into orbit. This was the height of the space race; the Soviet Union had been first into space with the Sputnik satellite in 1957 and in 1961 sent Yuri Gagarin up as the first person to orbit the Earth. In 1962 Lovell was accepted for the Gemini programme, which developed lunar flight technology and demonstrated, for those who were watching, that the Soviet venture, though big on rocket muscle, lagged in space science. Lovell's first flight was piloting Gemini 7, with Frank Borman, in 1965 on a record-breaking 14-day Earth orbit that included a rendezvous with Gemini 6. The following year he commanded Gemini 12 on the last Gemini mission. The first manned lunar mission, Apollo 8, at Christmas 1968, brought Lovell, together with Borman and William Anders, to global attention. It also raised morale in a year that had seen the Vietnamese Tet offensive, Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy assassinated, and urban uprisings across the US. Apollo 8 orbited the moon 10 times. Lovell and his colleagues read from Genesis to the 'good Earth' on Christmas Eve, were made Time magazine's men of the year, and their pictures appeared on stamps. That flight, the Guardian's Anthony Tucker reported at the time, had 'been as near to perfection as the most optimistic could have dreamed'. Then, for Lovell, came the flight of Apollo 13, which, after the initial media indifference, turned into a global event because of the drama involved. By the time he embarked on the mission, he had already spent a record-breaking 572 hours in space; his eventual tally, 715 hours and five minutes, was not exceeded until after the advent of the Skylab space station in 1973. Apollo 13 was, however, the end of Lovell's space career. Less than three years later he left Nasa and went into business in Houston. 'Our mission was a failure but I like to think it was a successful failure,' he said, and indeed, as a triumph over adversity, it was. It also ended the era that had begun with President John F Kennedy's declaration in 1961 that by the end of the decade the US should land a man on the moon and return him 'safely to the Earth'. Armstrong and Aldrin had fulfilled that pledge, but Lovell's adventure reminded Americans of the cost of the lunar programme and it posed the question, with the Soviet Union long out of the race, of what it had all been for. There were four more Apollo landings, but, as Gerard DeGroot wrote in Dark Side of the Moon (2007): 'Of all the lunar missions, probably 99% of Americans can recall only two: Apollo 11 and Apollo 13 – the first one and the nearly disastrous third one. The others have faded into obscurity and insignificance.' For years Nasa seemed reluctant to talk about Apollo 13, which irritated Lovell, who never lost his dream of walking on the moon. He was, another astronaut was reputed to have said, 'the Captain Ahab of outer space'. It took Ron Howard's film – Lovell liked Tom Hanks's portrayal of him, although he thought Kevin Costner would have been a better lookalike – to elevate Lovell and his comrades, justly, to the American pantheon. Lovell co-wrote the book, Lost Moon (1994), on which the movie was based, and had a fleeting on-screen role – greeting Hanks on the Iwo Jima – at the end of the film. Much earlier he made an appearance in The Man Who Fell to Earth (1976), starring David Bowie. Lovell's wife, Marilyn, died in 2023. He is survived by their children, Barbara, James, Susan and Jeffrey, 11 grandchildren and nine great-grandchildren. James Arthur Lovell, astronaut, test pilot and businessman, born 25 March 1928; died 7 August 2025
South China Morning Post
09-07-2025
- Science
- South China Morning Post
China's Chang'e-6 findings reveal asteroid strike may have altered moon's far-side mantle
China's Chang'e-6 lunar mission has yielded groundbreaking findings about the moon's hidden history, revealing evidence that a colossal asteroid strike more than 4 billion years ago could have fundamentally altered the deep interior of its far side. The research was published as four open-access papers on Wednesday in Nature, one of the world's oldest and most prestigious scientific journals with headquarters in London. While these papers are available to all readers regardless of subscriber status, Chinese teams are reporting a wave of scientific findings from the country's lunar programme that American government scientists may be locked out of because of a US decision to cancel subscriptions to Nature and other Springer Nature journals. 01:57 China's Chang'e-6 mission returns to Earth with first samples from moon's far side China's Chang'e-6 mission returns to Earth with first samples from moon's far side Officials cited budget concerns and dismissed the journals as 'junk science', which could hinder government scientists – including key Nasa researchers – from having access to major discoveries. The new analysis of the returned far-side rocks suggests that part of the moon's deep interior was stripped of important chemical ingredients more than 4 billion years ago – likely during a giant asteroid impact. The collision was so powerful it not only carved out a 2,500km-wide (1,550-mile) crater on the moon's far side – the largest of its kind in the solar system – but also changed the make-up of the moon's mantle hundreds of kilometres below the surface, according to a team led by scientists at the Institute of Geology and Geophysics in Beijing. Lava later erupted from this damaged mantle and cooled into volcanic rock that is depleted in elements such as titanium and thorium, as well as water. These samples are the most chemically depleted moon rocks ever studied – more so than any returned by the US, Soviet or earlier Chinese missions, which all came from the moon's near side, the team reported in Nature on Wednesday. Chang'e-6 is the first and only mission to return samples from the moon's far side. It landed in the South Pole-Aitken basin in June 2024 and brought back 1.9kg (4.2lbs) of soil, mostly from a 2.8 billion-year-old volcanic eruption.
South China Morning Post
01-07-2025
- Science
- South China Morning Post
China's Tianwen-2 returns Earth, moon images as land team simulates lunar lava cave probe
China's space agency on Tuesday released images of the Earth and moon captured by its asteroid-sampling Tianwen-2 spacecraft, while confirming that the probe was in good condition after more than a month in orbit. Advertisement The images were taken by the Tianwen-2 spacecraft's narrow field-of-view navigation sensor on May 30, according to the China National Space Administration (CNSA), which released them after image processing on the ground. This comes days after state media reported that researchers in northeastern China were testing autonomous robots in underground lava caves to simulate the terrain these may explore during future lunar missions. The Tianwen-2 spacecraft has been in orbit since it was launched from the Xichang Satellite Launch Centre in southwestern China on May 29. The probe was orbiting at a distance of more than 12 million kilometres (7.5 million miles) from Earth and was in 'good working condition', CNSA said in a news release on its website on Tuesday. The moon as pictured by the Tianwen-2. Photo: Xinhua The first image of the Earth was taken when the spacecraft was 590,000km from the planet, and the image of the moon was taken several hours later at a similar distance from the lunar surface.
ABC News
16-06-2025
- Science
- ABC News
Australian scientists aiming to grow plants on the moon prepare for launch of Lunaria One
An Australian team attempting to grow plants on the moon is finalising a prototype designed to carry an assortment of plants and seeds to the lunar surface. If the plants and seeds survive the journey, the team is hoping they will be able to thrive on the moon's surface. The project, which is being headed by Australian company Lunaria One, will hitch a ride on the exterior of a lander built by USA-based Intuitive Machines, and is currently scheduled to launch in March or April 2026. The goal of the mission is to discover how plants and seeds respond to the low-levels of gravity on the moon. Mission lead Lauren Fell said the project was intended to be the first step down a path that would eventually allow humans to have a sustainable presence on the moon. To achieve this goal, Lunaria One, along with partners from industry and universities, has developed a bio-module capable of keeping the plants warm and hydrated, while keeping the harsh vacuum environment of space out. Under current time frames, Lunaria One's bio-module and plants have to be ready for installation on the lunar lander that will carry them to the surface of the moon by the end of the year. A prototype built at RMIT University in Melbourne is being tested to make sure it can handle the high vibration and temperatures it will be subjected to during launch, as well as the potential radiation and temperature extremes it can experience in space. At the Centre for Accelerator Science nuclear lab in Lucas Heights near Sydney, another team is investigating which plant species to send into space. In a small plastic box, seeds and plants were bombarded with radiation equivalent to four days, eight days and five years on the lunar surface. "We are testing to see where those boundaries are," Ms Fell said. "Life is very resilient, and we have chosen species on purpose that have a lot of resilience – lichens for example have been shown to survive outside the International Space Station." The mission, named the Australian Lunar Experiment Promoting Horticulture, or ALEPH, is backed by a $3.6 million grant from the Australian Space Agency's Moon to Mars Demonstrator Mission Grants, with contributions from industry. It is hoped the mission will help incubate a domestic space industry, with the team developing as much of the equipment onshore as possible. One headache for scientists trying to get the plants to survive the trip to the moon is the weight limit. The entire project can only weigh 500 grams. Within that limit they must accommodate the pressurised bio-module, internal heating system, electronics, sensors, lighting, water, the plants themselves, and a space-rated camera that will watch for growth. Professor Caitlin Byrt, a biologist consultant on the team, was blunt about the plants' survival chances. There would be many things that could kill them on the journey, she said, including massive shaking at take-off, solar radiation, temperatures hundreds of degrees above boiling and below freezing, risk of module breach and water venting into space. "I think it's going to be a huge challenge to have something that's still kicking with life by the time it gets to the moon." A lunar day lasts about two weeks, and after touching down in the lunar dawn, the plants have about 72 hours to live before the environment simply becomes too hot. "After that it's show over," Professor Byrt said. "A little sprout growing — that's what I dream of, that's what I'd love to see." The mission was not an idle curiosity, Professor Byrt said, and may have applications back on Earth. Just as tech developed for the International Space Station led to better water recycling here, she said ALEPH could teach people how to grow food in inhospitable locations or after disasters. "Imagine if you could deliver systems that are super well optimised despite challenging conditions, that communities can use to be growing plants and supplying their own food," she said. Studies of microbes on the International Space Station showed new "alien" varieties had developed, and Dr Byrt said it was "probably inevitable" efforts to grow plants on the moon would create unique organisms, as nature found a way to balance a new closed ecosystem. ALEPH is hoped to be the first in a series of planned missions, all working towards human habitation on the moon, with subsequent missions to go for longer durations and carry more biomaterial. Intuitive Machines's chief technology officer Dr Tim Crain said what happened to plants at lunar gravity was almost completely unknown. "We've done a lot of experiments on the International Space Station for micro gravity, to see how living things respond to zero [gravity]. But this is an opportunity to see one-sixth gravity — does it inhibit growth, does it promote growth?" Dr Crain said. "It's a human story of exploration and we are proud that Australia is a part of that." ALEPH will be carried on Intuitive Machines's third lunar lander, and Dr Crain said the team needed three months to integrate the bio-module and install the lander on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket. As well as growing a domestic space industry, there were plans to use ALEPH to teach kids science at home. Lunaria One has partnered with science education company Stile Education to develop kits that could be sent to schools, allowing students to see whether different plants would grow in similar conditions to the moon. "It's curriculum-aligned so teachers will be able to know it works into the curriculum," Ms Fell said. "We want to make an Australia-wide connection to the project."
