Update for 12:15 a.m. ET on March 15: Firefly has called off the planned March 15 liftoff attempt due to an issue with the launch range. No new target date has been announced.
Firefly Aerospace will launch its Alpha rocket for the sixth time ever on Saturday morning (March 15), and you can watch the action live.
Alpha is scheduled to lift off from California’s Vandenberg Space Force Base on Saturday during a 52-minute window that opens at 9:25 a.m. EDT (1325 GMT; 6:25 a.m. local California time).
Firefly will stream the liftoff live in collaboration with NASASpaceflight; coverage will begin 30 minutes before launch. Space.com will carry the feed as well, if Firefly and NASASpaceflight make it available.
Saturday’s mission, which Firefly calls “Message in a Booster,” will send the LM 400 satellite technology demonstrator to low Earth orbit (LEO) for Lockheed Martin. It will be the first of up to 25 launches that Firefly conducts for the aerospace giant over the next five years under an agreement announced last year.
Related: New record! Firefly Aerospace launches Space Force mission 27 hours after receiving order
“The LM 400 tech demo was specifically built to showcase the company’s pathfinding efforts for its LM 400 mid-sized, multi-mission satellite bus, and to demonstrate the space vehicle’s operational capabilities on orbit for potential customers,” Firefly wrote in a mission description.
“As a platform, Lockheed Martin’s LM 400 is the company’s most flexible satellite bus, capable of serving military, commercial or civil customers,” Firefly added. “It can be customized to host a variety of missions — including remote sensing, communications, imaging and radar — and operate in any orbit.”
“Message in a Booster” will be the sixth flight for the two-stage, 96.7-foot-tall (29.6 meters) Alpha, which is capable of sending 2,270 pounds (1,030 kilograms) of payload to LEO.
The rocket suffered a partial failure during its fourth flight in December 2023, deploying its payload — an electronically steerable antenna developed by Lockheed Martin — into the wrong orbit. But Alpha bounced back on Flight 5 last June, sending eight cubesats to LEO as planned.
Firefly has been in the news quite a bit recently, and not because of Alpha: On March 2, the company’s Blue Ghost moon lander pulled off the second-ever soft lunar touchdown by a private vehicle.
Blue Ghost and its 10 NASA science instruments are still going strong on the lunar surface. The solar-powered lander is expected to go silent on or around March 16, when the sun sets over its landing site in the northern hemisphere of the moon’s near side.
